Author: Michael Fuchs Photography

A small herd of elk enjoying a warm California fall evening.

I always love finding amphibians in the wild.  I found this cute little toad on a mossy streambank.  Neat little creatures.

This is a beautiful remote spot where we camped several nights about 150 miles south of the arctic circle in the Yukon.  One afternoon, the sun broke through the clouds and made a super brilliant double rainbow. The vail of rain that was producing the rainbows was quite close to us and falling in the trees on the other side of the rocky clearing where we were camped.  Of all of the double rainbows that I have seen, this one seemed a little different; for whatever reason, the area between the rainbows was much darker than the rest of the surrounding sky. It looked like a dark grey strip in the sky with rainbows on either edge.

I took this photograph in a beautiful small forest in a valley near Chitina, Alaska.  The evening light was just perfect; it made the whole forest glow.

After traveling for almost two months, we took a break and camped for a week on the bank of a small glacial pond on the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska.  It was a beautiful spot with dynamic weather and lots of rain.  It was nice to have the time to watch the activity of the wildlife in the area.  This is a female Barrow’s Goldeneye that was very protective of the pond.  The duck couple was nesting along the banks of the pond and were on alert the whole time we were there.  The day before I took this photograph, we watched this female make a huge fuss at a moose that was getting too close to her ducklings.  Sometimes it’s nice to spend an extended time in one place.

This is a large grizzly bear that I photographed catching salmon near Hyder, Alaska.  During the salmon run, the water is completely full of fish.  Many steams and small rivers have several types of salmon spawning at the same time, and it’s interesting to watch how selective the bears are in picking what salmon they want to catch.  We spent over an hour watching this particular bear.  The salmon in this area can reach 40-70 lb.  It was pretty impressive to see how easily this bear could catch salmon that weighed 50 lb or more.

This is small group of elephants that were peacefully grazing on fresh tall grass.  Elephants have really interesting social behavior.  In the wild, they seem very intelligent and wary. I took this photograph in a beautiful valley in the Tarangire National Park in Tanzania.  Tarangire is an amazing place and reminds me of the Garden of Eden.