The chicken-like willow ptarmigan, weighing less than a kilogram, has the largest circumpolar range of any of the world’s 19 species of grouse. Its unwary nature makes this handsome bird one of my favorite subjects to observe and photograph. In North America, these hardy northern grouse are year round residents […]
When I am initially exploring an idea for a new book, I always start by asking myself three questions. First, how many books have been written on the same subject? If there are many, it could be that the market is saturated. If there are none, or very few, I […]
Two species of foxes live in the Canadian Arctic, the cosmopolitan red fox, which has the widest distribution of any wild mammal on Earth, and the circumpolar Arctic fox. Generally, the red fox lives in forests, while the Arctic fox lives on the tundra. In the past 50 years, however, […]
Here on the treeline in Wapusk National Park, a few tenacious spruce trees still manage to survive. I admit it, I’m a “leaf peeper”. Every year, like so many nature photographers, I excitedly await the colourful flamboyance of autumn. The French philosopher and Nobel laureate Albert Camus described the season […]
Living in prairie Alberta I don’t do a lot of underwater photography but several decades ago I began travelling to the Adams River in southern British Columbia to photograph the spectacle of the sockeye salmon spawning season. Every October, some salmon return to spawn in the Adams River, but every […]
Loons: Treasured Symbols of the North was published in October 2022. It compares the five species of loons in the world, four of which spend the summer months nesting in Canada. I had been thinking about writing a book on loons for nearly 50 years, starting in the early 1970s […]
It was -25°- when I took this photo of a bull muskox. The frost on his fur attests to the frigid temperature. Some of my fondest memories of arctic wildlife are so vivid that it seems I can still feel the wind ruffling my hair and hear the comforting songs […]
I became enchanted by the prairie grasslands more than 40 years ago and have been bewitched by birds even longer. Originally, native prairie grasslands occupied the entire central core of North America, roughly 138 million hectares. (340 million ac.) From March to May, male sage-grouse cluster on traditional dancing grounds, […]
Adult female great white shark The dramatic cover of Time magazine on June 23, 1975 pictured a gaping great white shark, its jaws rimmed with jagged menacing teeth, breaking the ocean’s surface in a terrifying predatory lunge. “Super Shark” the cover proclaimed. It was the heat of summer, and Universal […]
The birth of an aurora begins 150 million kilometres away, on the torrid surface of the sun. There, continuous gigantic explosions, called sunspots, send showers of charged particles, (electrons and protons) hurtling into space and racing towards Earth, sometimes nearly at the speed of light. Usually it takes 30 minutes […]
