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~ Selections from Tim Bird's travel photography archives

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Tag Archives: Monarch butterflies

Six images: Happy World Animals’ Day!

03 Tuesday Oct 2017

Posted by Tim Bird in Central America, Costa Rica, Finland, India, Mexico, namibia, nature, photography, Travel, travel photography, Uncategorized, wildlife

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

animals, Bandhavgarh, brown bears, conservation, Costa Rica, crocodiles, finland, India, kuhmo, Mexico, Monarch butterflies, namibia, natural environment, whales, wildlife, world animals' day

Who knew it? October 4 is World Animals’ Day! Time to feel the beast in you.

The official World Animal Day website states its aim as “To raise the status of animals in order to improve welfare standards around the globe. Building the celebration of World Animals’ Day unites the animal welfare movement, mobilising it into a global force to make the world a better place for all animals. It’s celebrated in different ways in every country, irrespective of nationality, religion, faith or political ideology. Through increased awareness and education we can create a world where animals are always recognised as sentient beings and full regard is always paid to their welfare.”

It seems like an event worth marking in photo form, so here are six photos from some of the unforgettable close encounters I’ve had with various wildlife in recent years. I’m not a wildlife photographer as such – I probably don’t have the required patience – but I have still been lucky enough to photograph animals in many special locations.

More observant readers will notice that there are in fact seven images here, not six. Sorry about that. It might happen again.

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Brown bears sound each other out in a summer storm in eastern Finland. There are a number of hides along the border between Finland and Russia where you can watch brown bears through the summer night. This time I was hosted by the Boreal Wildlife Centre near Kuhmo in Kainuu, right up on the northeast of Finland.

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Crocodiles, Costa Rica. This shot is from a famous bridge on one of the main highways crossing the country and spanning the Tarcoles River. Like much wildlife in Costa Rica, the crocs are easy to spot, sometimes dozens of them, basking in the mud beneath the bridge.

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Monarch butterflies, El Rosario, Angangueo, Mexico. This reserve is in the hills above the otherwise unexciting town of Angangueo, about four hours from Mexico City, to which millions of Monarch butterflies make their way each winter, migrating from the mountains of northwest America. I got to the forest before anyone else early in the morning and watched the wings of the insects warm and open as the sun rose. Truly extraordinary.

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Grey whale, Baja California, Mexico. I timed my trip to Mexico to be able to see both the butterflies (above) and the grey whales that congregate here to mate before heading back north. I can still barely believe that I saw these enormous animals. Rather than breaching, grey whales pop their heads above water and rotate their heads like periscopes. They are very curious and once they realised that myself and my two companions in a small boat were not a threat, they started to emerge, dozens of them in all directions. It was hard to know which way to look.

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Cape fur seal, Cape Cross seal colony, Namibia. I left the group of journalists I was with for half a day to take a private trip up to Cape Cross, and I could smell the vast colony and hear their calls before I saw them, hundreds of them, spread across the rocks and spilling into the South Atlantic. The saddest thing was spotting the pups separated from their mothers and being instructed by the warden that it was against the rules to try to pair them up – nature must take its own course.

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A green lizard, Tortuguero swamps, Costa Rica. Tortuguero is on a waterway running parallel to the Caribbean coast. All sorts of wildlife, including sloths, iguanas, snakes and brightly coloured tree frogs can be spotted on early morning boat ‘safaris’. A magical place.

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A mother tiger and cubs, Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve, Madhya Pradesh, India. This little family, minus father, came strolling along the forest track by surprise, obligingly passing my jeep within just a couple of metres. My pulse shoots up when I look at these photos. My base was the very accommodating, friendly and knowledgeable Jungle Mantra Resort – recommended.

These images are the tip of my photographic iceberg, much of it stored on my website at www.timbirdphotography.com. Watch out for my Instagrams at @tim_bird_photo, Tweets at https://twitter.com/BirdTimothy and Facebook stuff at https://www.facebook.com/timbirdtravelphoto/

Thanks for dropping in. Please share and do visit again!

 

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Six Picks: The Migrating Monarchs of Mexico

13 Saturday Dec 2014

Posted by Tim Bird in Uncategorized

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Tags

Angangueo, butterflies, El Rosario, environment, insects, Mexico, Michoacan, migration, Monarch butterflies, TPOTY, Travel Photographer of the Year, travel photography

Six images in a photo blog taken from my travel photography archives: visit www.timbirdphotography.com to see more of my pictures.

Last week the Travel Photographer of the Year competition announced its results for 2014 and I was delighted to get a picture Commended in the Wild & Vibrant single image category. I’ve been Highly Commended in the past, I won their 10th anniversary celebration competition last year, and I have been a finalist in previous years as well as this one. Thousands of entries are received from over 100 countries so I regard it as a definite compliment to be recognized in any way. The competition has become as much a part of my annual calendar as Christmas, along with the exhibition at the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington, London, that displays the winners and which takes place next year from July 24 to September 5. There’s a link to the winners’ gallery at the bottom of this page.

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My commended picture, above, shows an early morning scene from the forests in the mountains close to the town of Angangueo in Michoacan, Mexico. The forests are protected to some extent against logging and wayward tourism as part of the El Rosario Butterfly Biosphere Reserve. Every year in the North American winter millions of Monarch butterflies make the long flight south – over 2,000 kilometres – to these same few hills to spend the winter.

When I made the climb up into the forest one early March morning in 2009, the first visitor of the day, the sun was still rising and the butterflies were resting in vast clusters in the treetops. In fact, it took my eyes some time to adjust to the fact that these were not leaves but an enormous congregation of insects. When the sun began to rise, the wings of the butterflies began to open in the warmth and after an hour or two the sky was alive with a softly fluttering orange cloud.

It is one of the most extraordinary, beautiful and spectacular phenomena in the natural world, made even more remarkable by the fact that the butterflies that return north to the United States and Canada from migration will not return to spend another winter here – in other words, the insects are somehow instinctively programmed to make their way to the same hills and forests.

A Mexican translator friend who helped me to arrange my visit tells me that the area is now more dangerous to get to because of the rising drug cartel-related and other violence that is sadly part of Mexico’s everyday life, so my visit was well timed. Happily the butterflies are immune to this particular kind of inane human activity, although not to environmental human damage.

It’s nice to be able to draw attention to a positive story from Mexico, a beautiful and exciting country with a vibrant culture. Perhaps my Commended picture and the others you can see here will serve as a small reminder of the country’s happier attractions.

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Butterflies gather in thick orange mats in streams and springs.

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The butterflies will land on your hands and clothing but you shouldn’t actively pick them up or you can damage the delicate wings.

butterflies-4353  butterflies-4241 butterflies-4120

In my next issue of Six Picks I plan to show you some of the images that were shortlisted for the TPOTY competition but didn’t quite make the winner list – watch this space!

TPOTY winners this year: http://www.tpoty.com/winners/2014

Congratulations to all the winners – these are some of the world’s top travel shooters and to get even close to their company is an honour and pleasure – and encouraging too.

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