Nat Geo - Top 25 Photographs from the Wilderness

 "Curious cub" by guide Kyle de Nobrega at Lion Sands Private Game Reserve. "Nothing quite like the curiosity of a cat."

 

 

Kyle de Nobrega

 

Explore the wilderness with us… Within the next 10-15 years we will see the last-remaining wilderness area on earth dominated by the demands of growing human populations and undermined by accelerated climate change. When the earth’s last wild places are gone, all we will have are fenced off protected areas dependent on constant intervention to persist and marginalized by the demands of sustained development in emerging markets. Guides, rangers, researchers, ecotourists, photographers, artists and conservationists around the world apply themselves everyday to sharing, studying, photographing, writing about, protecting, conserving and celebrating the “wild” with their guests, co-workers, colleagues, and local communities. These amazing photographs are a window into their world, a world where the lions, elephants, orangutans and leopards still reign supreme and we can dream of that perfect morning in the wilderness…View the Pics!

Nat Geo - Exploring the Wildest Places on Earth

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Nat Geo: Birds of Prey (Photos)

Young Eagle

Photograph by Jacky Gerritsen, My Shot

Young eagle with an attitude

Horned Owl

Photograph by Joe Dubberly, My Shot

A horned owl stopped by to get a closer look at me. What I found most amazing was the curiosity of these little guys to the activities of humans.

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Nat Geo - Photo Gallery: Big Cat Cubs

 

African Lion Cub

Photograph by Beverly Joubert

An African lion cub rests in the tall grasses of Botswana’s Okavango Delta. Once ranging across the African continent and into Syria, Israel, Iraq, Pakistan, Iran, and even northwest India, lions have declined to as few as 20,000 animals from about 450,000 just 50 years ago.

 

Asiatic Leopard Cub

Photograph by Steve Winter

An Asiatic leopard cub in the Hukawng Valley in Myanmar (Burma) became an orphan after hunters killed its mother to sell her body parts for use in traditional medicine. In 2010, the entire valley—about the size of Vermont—was designated by the government of Myanmar as a tiger sanctuary, a major conservation step that protects big cats and other rare species throughout the territory.

 

Lion Cubs Playing

Photograph by Beverly Joubert

Lion cubs play in the Okavango Delta in Botswana. Loss of habitat, prey decline, pesticides, and even canine distemper and tuberculosis have caused lion numbers to quickly decline across Africa.

Big Cats Initiative

National Geographic is working to avert the extinction of lions, tigers, and other big cats with the Big Cats Initiative, a comprehensive program that supports innovative projects. Learn how you can help save these animals.

For just $5, you can help save big cats by uploading a photo of your little kitty here.

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(VIDEO) Birds of Prey: Northwest Eagles

Nat Geo Animals: Mother's Love Photo Gallery

 

Mother's Love

 

Photograph by Anup Shah/Animals-Animals-Earth Scenes

Mother's Love is brimming with the immeasurable love that mothers in the animal kingdom have for their young, beautifully expressed in a collection of moving and intimate portraits from National Geographic, the world's best in animal photography.

 

Duck and Ducklings

 

Photograph by lozan365/iStockphoto.com

A duck and her ducklings walk along a riverbank. Ducklings believe that the first thing they see is their mother.
Mother's Love, the first in a new, affordable line of gift books from National Geographic, is a great way to remind ourselves of the universal power of a mother's love.

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Nat Geo: Cheetahs - Four Cubs' Journey to Adulthood

 

Sibling Squash

Photograph by Gus Mills

National Geographic Big Cats explorer Gus Mills is examining cheetahs in the arid environment of the Kalahari. The cheetahs are tracked using San trackers, radios, and DNA analyses. This data helps park managers ensure the continued existence of the cheetahs and future monitoring. It also serves as an example for the conservation of the species in other arid regions. With National Geographic's support, Mills was able to complete his fieldwork and research.

Pictured: A three-week-old cub squashes one of its two litter mates during a brief visit by Mills to the den while the mother was out hunting. Mills and his team need to count the cubs and collect DNA from fur samples in order to establish paternity. Such brief interactions do not disturb the cheetahs, and they have never observed any adverse reaction by the mother or cubs.

 

Daily Special

Photograph by Gus Mills

A mother cheetah feeds her four six-week-old cubs a springbok in what could be their first experience of meat. This mother was successful in raising all four male cubs to independence.

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NatGeo Photo Gallery: Polar Bears

 

Polar Bear Mother With Cub

Photograph by Norbert Rosing

Dutiful mothers, female polar bears usually give birth to twin cubs, which stay with her for more than two years until they can hunt and survive on their own.

 

Polar Bear Sleeps Soundly

Photograph by Flip Nicklin

A sleeping polar bear looks adorable, but beware! With no natural enemies, polar bears are at the top of the Arctic food chain. They are fearless, and will readily attack humans.

 

Polar Bear Cub Resting With Its Mother

Photograph by Flip Nicklin

In winter, female polar bears give birth to two cubs in an igloo-like den, which insulates the mother and babies against the brutal winds and frigid Arctic temperatures outside.

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Nat Geo – Photos: Pictures of the Year

Photograph by Steve Winter, National Geographic

Global Vision Award

A tiger peers at a camera trap it triggered during a morning hunt in the forests of northern Sumatra, Indonesia.

Taken by Steve Winter forNational Geographic magazine and the Panthera wild cat conservation group, the picture won the Global Vision Award “for extensive long-term projects that focuses on the environment, science, or natural history,” Shaw said.

(See more tiger pictures from Winter’s assignment.)

“What’s great about [Steve Winter's] work is that it’s not only about the animals but also humankind’s interactions with the natural world, both in a positive and negative sense.”

Among the two Global Vision runners-up is David Guttenfelter for his National Geographic assignment “Japan’s Nuclear Refugees” (see pictures). (The National Geographic Society owns National Geographic News.)
Published March 5, 2012

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Stunning Time-Lapse Video of Yosemite National Park

Discovery News - Jan. 25, 2012 — The iconic moment for me in this film of Yosemite National Park is that of a rock climber preparing to settle in for a long beautiful night under the stars in a crook of a cliff, a headlamp the only illumination indicating human presence. Like ants crawling about on the rock faces, people are put in perspective to the grand beauty of the landscape in this film.

This video is a collaboration between Sheldon Neill and Colin Delehanty, who met through the video website Vimeo. All timelapses were shot on the Canon 5D Mark II with a variety of Canon L and Zeiss CP.2 Lenses.

“For this project we planned to shoot on top of Half Dome at night because very few people would ever go up there at that time, let alone bring a 6 foot aluminum rail and their camera gear to do time-lapses. We wanted to create something that had never been done before. Something special that would put Yosemite in the spotlight,” Delehanty and Neill told io9.

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Wild Gorillas Groom U.S. Tourist in Uganda

Wild gorillas approach tourist John J. King II in a video still. 

Still image from video courtesy Jonathan Rossouw

A troop of wild mountain gorillas recently turned a typical ecotourism encounter upside down when the animals paid a visit to a tented camp in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park.

Video footage, now gone viral, shows baby and adult gorillas approaching U.S. tourist John J. King II, sitting with him, and even grooming him as he sits in quiet amazement—right next to a giant male silverback gorilla.

“These gorillas were interacting with me just like I was one of their own, and it happened completely naturally,” King said. “Who knows why it happened?”

Local rangers were also stumped, telling King that, while baby gorillas sometimes interact with humans, the rangers had never known adult animals to take such an interest.

Mountain gorillas are listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Only about 800 are thought to exist in the wild, though recent studies suggest their numbers may be growing. (Related: “‘Spectacular’ Gorilla Growth in Congo, Despite War.”)
A major population of some 300 animals can be found in Bwindi, where King’s astonishing encounter took place this month.

“A Total Gorilla High”

Visiting the gorillas in Bwindi is a serious endeavor that requires permits issued by the Uganda Wildlife Authority and the help of local rangers and trackers who can find wild gorillas that are habituated to human presence.

Permits run $500 (U.S.) a day—with no guarantee of anything more than a “nice spirited hike of one to eight hours,” said King, a wildlife photographer and conservationist. (Visit King’s blog for more details about his gorilla experience and other travels.)

But on two successive days, King’s group found and observed gorillas eating wild celery, playing, nursing, and resting.

See more pictures: Your Kenya Photos >>

On the second day, the tourists met a gorilla troop called the Rusheguras—the same group that would later return the favor with an unexpected visit to the tent camp the next morning.

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Zoologger: The biggest spider web in the world

Hero of engineering (Image: Matjaž Gregorič)

Zoologger is our weekly column highlighting extraordinary animals – and occasionally other organisms – from around the world

Species: Caerostris darwini

Habitat: Madagascar, alarming arachnophobes and mayflies in equal measure
The spider attaches a line of silk to the tree branch she is standing on, by the side of a river, and bungee-jumps into space. Dangling in mid-air, she begins spewing out silk. And more silk. And still more silk.

Eventually she has released more than 25 metres of continuous strands, which drift away downwind, across the river. Suddenly she stops, and begins reeling the line back in. It pulls taut. Success! The other end has tangled itself in a bush on the far bank.

This is the first step in the construction of the world’s biggest spider web, which will hang above a tropical river. Perched in the centre of her vast web, the Darwin’s bark spider can feast on huge numbers of insects after they emerge from the water.

Silk architect

 

The Darwin’s bark spider was discovered in Madagascar only last year, by Matjaž Kuntner of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana and Ingi Agnarsson of the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan. With Kuntner’s colleague Matjaž Gregorič and Todd Blackledge of the University of Akron in Ohio, they have carried out more field studies to find out how the spiders build their webs and what they are for.

The Darwin’s bark has a built-in advantage. Its silk is the toughest of any spider, which is particularly remarkable as spider silks are tough anyway, and stronger than many artificial substances.

The river-spanning lines of silk are the longest section of the web. The spider’s method of building them – trailing silk into the open air and hoping for the best – is similar to the common spider trick of “ballooning”. Spiders who want to travel long distances release long strands of silk that act like kites and pull the spiders into the air. Ballooning is found in most species of spider, suggesting it has an ancient evolutionary origin – the bridging lines may have developed from it.

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Kayakers plunge down waterfalls and navigate through churning rapids

It's amazing how calm, even happy, the kayakers in this 
video look as they make the first descent down Brazil's 
Mambucaba River, which drops more than 4,000 feet 
over 20 miles – half of that in just 6.5 miles.

Discovery News - The video features some hairy moments, like when one paddler gets sucked upside down in fast-moving water and trapped beneath a tree branch. Sometimes, the kayakers have to scamper down sheer, wet cliffs to get around treacherous, impassable waters.

For the most part though, they plunge down waterfalls and navigate through churning rapids with skill and style. They almost make it look easy.

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First Quadruple Rainbow Picture

Photograph courtesy Michael Theusner, Applied Optics


NatGeo - Blink and you might miss them, but these two colorful smudges (center) form the second half of the first quadruple rainbow to be caught on camera, validating years of claims that such phenomena could exist, a new study says.

“[It's as if] the natives are telling you that there’s this creature in the rain forest, but they only have stories,” said Raymond Lee, a professor of meteorology at the U.S. Naval Academy, who recently published a study in the journal Applied Opticsdescribing the conditions under which a tertiary rainbow should be visible.

Lee’s research inspired some scientists to try to snap photos of the elusive vision, resulting in this picture, taken June 11 near Bremerhaven, Germany. “When you finally succeed in capturing it in photography, that’s a thrill,” Lee said.

And while “quadruple rainbow” might call to mind a stack of four arcs, only two rainbows can be caught in a single frame, because of the way light reflects and bends within raindrops.                          

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Polly Wants a Sobriety Test - Watch out for inebriated lorikeets in Australia

Discovery News - In Australia’s Northern Territory, red-collared lorikeets, a brightly colored parrot, seem to get tanked every year starting at the end of the dry season in June and August and ending with the wet season in October and November. The apparent avian alcoholics stagger about the streets and fall from trees.

PHOTOS: Magic Mushrooms in My Yard

“They exhibit odd behavior like falling over or difficulty flying [and] they keep running into things,” said veterinarian Stephen Cutter from The Ark Animal Hospital in Australian Geographic.
Like shy humans, the apparently blitzed birds get friendlier and lose their fear of people. But the revelry may be a sign of a deadly illness, not just bacchanal bliss from fermented fruit.

SCIENCE CHANNEL: Alcohol Quiz

Unlike a human on a bender, the birds don’t just sleep it off. The effects last several days, and are accompanied by respiratory problems and a discharge from bird’s nostrils, mouth, and eyes. Cutter suspect a virus may be at work.

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The Most Amazing Science and Tech Pictures of the Week

Wingsuit Flyer American Jeb Corliss, wearing a 

wingsuit, jumped out of a helicopter at 6,000 feet and 

glided through the massive Tianmen Cave in Hunan 

Province, China. He landed safely, thanks to a parachute. 

Getty Images

After realizing that the PopSci editors’ chat room is awash in amazing pictures that don’t necessarily see the light of day on our site (due to oldness, redundancy, or a host of other dealbreakers) we thought: why are we keeping these to ourselves? Here are the pictures this week that made us gawk, laugh, and email the .jpg links to our friends, from a perfectly geometrical haircut to a dude gliding through a giant Chinese cave in a wingsuit.

Click here to see this week’s most amazing science and tech images.

Why Do Leaves Change Color?: Photos

Complicated Colors

The secrets of why the leaves of trees change yellow or red in the autumn are slowly being revealed. Those eye-seducing hues, it appears, are a lot more than pretty. They’re the result of trees doing their utmost to survive. They’re the shades of evolutionary success.

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Most Amazing Animal Friendships: Photos

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