News & Views
When a Photograph Tells a Lie
Human beings are ‘relational’ creatures, always on the look-out for an individual connection with others. We only have to see how most of us treat our beloved pets to see that we also readily extend this search for perceived relationship to other species. As I discussed in ‘Mastering Wildlife Photography’, this leads us to a tendency to anthropomorphism (the attribution of human form or behavior to an animal). Purists in the scientific community will often caution naturalists against anthropomorphism and indeed most animals do speak a very different language to us both in terms of their utterances and body language.
A week with the grizzlies
Research for locations offering opportunities for close encounters with bears resulted in me making a trip to Alaska’s Lake Clark National Park in June 2014. At its very southernmost tip the park meets the sea and here at this time of year Grizzly Bears come out into the open, many with cubs in tow. The reason is their quest for the protein necessary to see them through the coming winter months. Read on for an account of this trip...