Coyote Yipps

This new year I’ll be into the 16th year of my coyote documentation work! I take photos in order to record what is going on — my camera is a tool, my notebook: as the saying goes, a photo is worth a thousand words. Location, time of day, which coyote is involved and their all-important behaviors and interactions with each other and their environment are all captured by the camera without having to pull out a pen and take notes. But I don’t necessarily consider myself a *photographer* per se in that I’m not out to get pretty pictures: I’m hoping my documentation work goes much deeper than that, where content supersedes quality: much of my recording takes place at dawn or dusk when the lighting is not good so the images are often not of super quality: they are often distant, blurry or grainy.

That being said, the sheer number of photos I take guarantees that many are bound to be good ones in a photographic sense, and here is such a photo which I entered into a wildlife photo contest and received recognition! I’m hoping my images and the observational stories I attach to them will raise awareness, instruct, and change perspectives. But sometimes there’s more fun involved than anything else, and this photo attests to that!

By the way, photo contests are a fun and exciting way to donate to wildlife: You pay a small fee for each entry which serves as a donation to the sponsoring organization. And if you win, you can recycle your prize money as a donation, which is what I do at my favorite wildlife rehabilitation center: WildCare in San Raphael. To see the the rest of the winners of the WildCare Photo Contest for 2021 visit: https://discoverwildcare.org/living-with-wildlife-photography-contest/. Or see WildCare’s Winter Magazine here. Enjoy! Also, think of donating to this organization which does fantastic work!