This site is dedicated to wildlife and landscape photography.
This site is dedicated to wildlife and landscape photography.
I photographed this coyote yesterday just before the sun set I spotted it about fifteen or twenty minutes before sunset and stayed with it until the sun actually set. It’s my favorite time to photograph wildlife, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that. I assume the light is just ad good at sunrise, but it’s a heck of a lot harder spotting anything to photograph in the dark.
There was a photo in the news several months ago about a blue-eyed coyote at Point Reyes. The photo was taken by my friend, Daniel Dietrich who runs Point Reyes Safaris, or one of his clients. I look for it when I’m out there.
Just for the fun of it, a few days days ago I modified a photo of a coyote I photographed recently by giving it blue eyes. See my post a few days ago.
I think I’ve seen “Blue Eyes” once or twice, but I never made a positive ID because I never got a close enough view of it. As luck would have it, recently I did. See the photos below. The first image was taken at relatively close range. The second photo is just a crop of the first image. It seems to have some damage to its left eye.
In the third photo the coyote was a bit farther away and it becomes harder at that distance to tell for sure if the eyes are blue.
Looking back at the blue-eyed coyote that I created in Photoshop a few days ago, I have to say that without having the real one as a reference, I came pretty close to the blue eyes of the real blue-eyed coyote.
There is some discussion of blue-eyed coyotes on the internet.
I hope you’ve read this far because this whole discussion of the coyote’s eyes made me realize something I never realized before. I think I’m right about this because I just went through all the bird and mammal eyes on my website and the human eye is totally different from the eyes of all those birds and animals. I didn’t find any bird or mammal with any part of the visible eye that was white. They were all either all black or they had black pupils inside irises that covered all of the rest of the visible portion of the eye. Our irises are tiny in comparison to theirs and most of the visible portion of our eyes are white. Why is that? So, I googled it. Here’s one explanation: “Only humans obviously show the whites of their eyes, making it easier to communicate and deceive at a glance”. For more click here.
Blue-eyed Coyote, Point Reyes National Seashore
Apparent Injury to Left Eye
It’s difficult to see blue eyes at normal viewing distance.
Hearing a howl or two from coyotes is usually all you get. But in this case I was treated to several minutes of singing. Hearing coyotes howl is one of the best sounds in nature. Other favorites of mine include the calls of wolves; the bugling of bull elk during the rut; the call of a loon on a lake; and the honking of Canada geese as they fly in formation overhead.
