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Dapper AF
A Diademed Sandpiper-Plover looking mighty fine as it feeds in a pond high up in the Andes.
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Posing
I had hoped to get a photo of a Puma posing dramatically on some rocks. That never quite came together, but she is standing in a rock on this photo, and I gotta say, she really pops against the Mata Negra.
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Puma Love
While Dania stole the show and our hearts for most of the trip, this was the most special Puma encounter we had. The darker Puma is a shy female who hasn’t been named. The lighter one is a male. In general the males never get as comfortable with humans as the females can. We first
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Juvenile Diademed Sandpiper-Plover
This juvenile Diademed Sandpiper-Plover is starting to fill out and develop a more adult plumage. The chicks start out as cotton balls on toothpicks like all plovers, just more mottled than North American plovers. The adolescents don’t sport the striking diadem the adults have, but do have a richer and more varied coloration on their
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The Land (Almost) Before Time
Dania looks out from the estancia as the sunrise warms Torres del Paine National Park. While much of this area looks at once pristine and millions of years old, there are important exceptions. A driver on the road down below claimed the life of one of Dania’s cubs last year. Her other cub was taken
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Dania
While Pumas aren’t always easy to find, sometimes you get really lucky. We found Dania just before dawn on our first day in the field. She was sitting on a small ridgeline just as we entered the estancia. Shortly after that, she relocated to these bushes to take a snooze. If she’d moved spots a
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Patagonian Scene
A Puma gazes out over the Paine Massif. Taken on a Puma photography tour with @danieldietrichphoto, which was truly an unforgettable experience. For all the photos I’ve seen of Pumas and the Torres del Paine, I still wasn’t prepared for the feeling of being out in the wild Patagonian landscape watching these majestic cats go
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Diademed Sandpiper-Plovers at Valle del Yeso
My big wildlife trip for this year centered around a week-long Patagonian Puma photography tour. Given the length of the trip, I wanted to spend some extra time in Chile. Just getting to Santiago from San Francisco is a 17 hour trip, with the flight from Santiago to Patagonia taking another 3 hours. As I
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Diademed Sandpiper Plover
The Diademed Sandpiper-Plover is a fascinating shorebird, one of a small number of high alpine specialist shorebirds. It inhabits glacier-fed wetlands high in the Andes. I photographed this one at 3000 ft, but they’re found as high as 4500 ft. Despite their name, they’re a true plover. Very little is known about them. For example,