Our guide had positioned the zodiac several hundred meters in front of a group of killer whales and turned the engine off. We waited several minutes and were just about to leave when this orca surfaced right in front of the boat and swam underneath us.
With a week left of holidays I decided to head out to the west coast. I headed over to Vancouver Island and went down to Victoria as I had heard from a friend that the killer whales were in the area. There are 3 groups of resident killer whales in this area totally about 95 animals and they feed exclusively on fish, specifically salmon. Transient killer whales, which I didn’t see, roam up and down the coast in small groups or as individuals and feed on marine mammals, mainly seals.
I took this picture outside my tent when I was camping in Ucluelet, a small fishing town located on the west side of Vancouver Island and next to the Pacific Rim National Park. The campground was next to the harbor and the eagles had a nest in a tree overlooking the campground and the harbor.
This beaver was not happy that I was sitting on top of it’s lodge and made sure that everyone else new that I was there. After several tail slaps it dove under the water and swam back into the lodge. Over the next few days they became used to me and decided that I wasn’t worth the effort.
A beautiful cinnamon black bear cub who is the sibling of the black bear cub I posted a picture of on June 15th. This one was much more timid and took a lot of coaxing from the other cub to get it to come down from the tree and run deeper into the forest. Black bears can have offspring that are either black, cinnamon (brown) or even white (aka, spirit bears in British Columbia).
I came across this mother and her calf along the shore of a lake. The calf, no bigger than the mom’s head must have been born that night as it was still unstable on it’s feet and had a very hard time walking through the tall grass. The mother would try to call and lead the calf away but the calf was still not strong enough to follow. I left after a short time and returned to the same spot later that afternoon but they had moved off into the forest.
One of the largest dragonflies with a ‘cigar’ shaped abdomen. This one was trying to warm up after the morning frost had melted.
The largest of the woodpeckers in Canada, I spotted this bird among the burnt wood from a prescribed burn in Banff National Park (Sawback burn in 1993). The woodpecker managed to chisel off the charred wood to expose an ant nest underneath and had a good meal of ant larvae.
In between eating dandelions mom and cubs would wrestle with each other. Here the cubs teamed up to take on mom
Late in the afternoon this coyote wandered into a meadow where I was photographing a bull elk. It didn’t seem bothered by my presence and quickly found it’s next meal when it pounced on a ground squirrel and gobbled it up.
This photo was taken near Calling Lake, about 2 hours north of Edmonton. I was on a quad when I interrupted a black bear mother and her two cubs. The mom ran into the forest and the cubs climbed the nearest trees. This baby bear climbed down the tree and ran farther into the forest, but turned around to see if his sibling was following.
Owen Slater Photography 