I officially began my full-time, freelance photography/writing career in September 1979. Young, and blindly optimistic, I reasoned that Jasper National Park, in the wilds of southwestern Alberta, would be the perfect place to scoop the competition, and find fame and fortune. So, on September 4th of that year, Aubrey and […]
One of the great rewards of writing a natural history book is the discoveries you make along the way. My first book, Married to the Wind, was a celebration of the prairie grasslands and while writing it I discovered the fascinating beauty of the Great Sand Hills in southwestern Saskatchewan. […]
Since childhood, I’ve been an enthusiastic bird nerd, and one of the first exotic birds I identified was a boreal owl. Since then, I have seen all 19 species of owls found in Canada and the United States. It’s common, however, to meet people who have never seen an owl […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
In the mid-1800s, the legendary American whaling captain Charles Melville Scammon accidentally discovered the narrow opening to a large sheltered lagoon along the Pacific coast of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. What Scammon didn’t initially realize was that the lagoon was the largest of three such protected lagoons that eastern gray whales […]
The S/V Rembrandt van Rijn under sail in Scoresby Sound, Greenland. Last August I was hired to guide a small group of photographers to eastern Greenland to capture the crystalline beauty of the region’s legendary icebergs. Our destination was Scoresby Sound – one of the largest fiord systems in the […]
The wave-battered shore where the crabs forage for algae. I wrote this month’s posting last June in the Galapagos Islands where I was lucky to be leading a photography tour focusing on the natural wonders of this, the most famous of archipelagos. Crabs of several species scuttle and scatter along […]
