A few nice wildlife animals images I found:
370e I'm being good mom!
Image by jjjj56cp
Featured in "The Sunshine Blog" flickrsunshineblog.blogspot.com/
1Jan 2, 2013 "Animals"
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croc
Image by kevinzim
Monsterious Crocodile, Kachikali, Bakau, Gambia.
Mooses
Image by Unhindered by Talent
And now we begin our first of two full days in Denali National Park. The park is huge, being over 6 million acres (roughly the size of Massachusetts, or something like 25,000 square kilometers). And, in all that vast space there is exactly one (yeah, like 1!) road into the park, a narrow (esp. by American standards) two lanes that dead end at either Wonder Lake (after 85 miles) or Kantishna (after 90 miles).
The highway between Anchorage and Fairbanks (the two largest cities in Alaska) was only completed back In 1972 (that's in my lifetime!). Correctly anticipating a significant increase in visitors, Park officials worried that increased traffic along the one and only road in the park would adversely both the environment of the park and the relationship between the wildlife and humans. Consequently they closed this road to general traffic and brought in a fleet of school buses to shuttle visitors in and out of the Park.
On our first day in the Park, we took on of these shuttle buses out to Wonder Lake and back, which is roughly an 11 hour round trip. The next gazillion photos will be from that trip... Aren't you excited?!?
This first shot was of some moose along the side of the road very shortly after we'd boarded, and before we'd really left the inhabited part of the Park around the Visitor's Center.
When there's a wildlife sighting, the buses stop to let everyone have a view. This often consists of one or more tiny specks in the far distance (pretty much all my bear pictures are of that variety), but occassionally something decides to pose up close in the hopes of being featured on a postcard :-). While these two look cute, moose are one of the most dangerous animals in the park, especially if you get between a mother and her calf. We were repeatedly told not to run if you encounter a bear (they'll think you're prey and give chase), but to run like the dickens if you encounter a moose...
