Category Archives: Nature Photography

Colorado nature photographer and environmentalist John Fielder sat on a couch inside his Summit County home recently gazing at jagged Gore Range mountains, not through the frame of a camera but a window — a spectacular scene among thousands that he has immortalized.

A herd of elk had passed outside. A mountain grouse had been singing sonorously at the door.

“Here I am at 72,” Fielder said, “and cancer is trying to take my life.”

He’s been enduring this pancreatic cancer by relying on the same rational approach he honed in handling countless “curveballs” nature hurled while he covered all of Colorado’s 104,094 square miles photographing landscapes. Vehicle breakdowns above timberline, rafts flipping in whitewater rapids dumping him and all his gear, bears bulling into his camp, sudden storms plunging temperatures below freezing — all became challenges for the father of three to overcome by using brainpower, avoiding panic, and summoning strength the way a mountain climber does in ascent.

Fielder also got through personal tragedies — losing his wife, Gigi, after she was diagnosed at 52 with Alzheimer’s disease. He suffered especially after his son died by suicide.

“You know, I have had to self-rescue myself, get out of difficult situations, over 100 times before,” Fielder said. “To me, this is simply self-rescue number 101. It is a problem to be solved.”

Chemotherapy interrupts a slower existence he’d envisioned, skiing with titanium-reinforced knees, hiking and taking photos in Colorado’s Blue River Valley. But the cancer, diagnosed a year ago, also has spurred Fielder to review his life’s work and focus on his mission: helping Coloradans respect nature, most urgently by slowing global warming and stopping environmental destruction.

Taken together, his photos over nearly 50 years give residents an unprecedented perspective on their natural heritage and how large-scale settlement has affected landscapes where the previous human inhabitants, native tribes, lived sustainably on the land. The photos — including 7,300 entrusted to the public at the state’s History Colorado repository — have become the main visual baseline for assessing changes as the climate warms.

“No matter what happens to me in the next six months, my photos are there at History Colorado,” he said as he sat. “Whatever we can do to stave off the impacts of climate warming, maybe my photos can be part of that.”

Fielder grew up in North Carolina, nudged toward a life in commerce. His father excelled in that arena, building up the Ivey’s department store chain and embracing public service. Upon graduation from Duke University, Fielder fell into work as a real estate broker and, married in 1982 with two children and a third on the way, was managing a May D & F store in south metro Denver.

He and Gigi made an escape plan for a life lived largely outdoors. He would turn his nature photography hobby into a business by selling photo calendars and coffee table books. Forty years later, he tallies some 50 collections of photos he has published with roughly 1 million copies sold.

One book — “Colorado: 1870 to 2000” — leverages 19th-century photos by William Henry Jackson, who was sent by the U.S. Geological Survey to document western territories at a time when census records show Colorado had 39,864 residents. Fielder re-photographed what Jackson saw and created a side-by-side comparison at the start of the 21st century — when Colorado had 4.3 million residents and industries including cattle ranching; mining of gravel, gold, coal, gas, and oil; house-building; and tourism. He dedicated the book to the people of Colorado, urging them to “examine our relationship with the land,” declaring “there is no more beautiful place on Earth than Colorado” and “very few places more fragile.”

His photos of high mountains and valleys exposed Colorado to the world, drawing tens of thousands of visitors and new residents and inspiring some to value the wildness that remained in the West. Perhaps only John Denver, with his song “Rocky Mountain High,” drew more attention to Colorado, said Jerry Mallet, a former Chaffee County commissioner who runs the river protection organization Colorado Headwaters.

Looking back, Fielder wrestles with his role. “Obviously, too many people in one place, too many footprints, can destroy the very place you want to protect,” he said. “But the more people that go out and smell, taste, touch, hear, as well as see, Colorado, the more people are likely to vote for the right candidates and issues on their ballots — to not only repair environmental damage but to protect these areas.”

In the early 1990s, he decided he had to do more to save the natural landscapes he photographed. An environmental movement in the state gained momentum under Fielder’s leadership, Mallet said.

Fielder observed a widening degradation from multiple threats: development devouring open space, tourists overrunning national parks, and now the ruinous fires, droughts, and extreme storms driven by climate warming.

His advocacy began as Senator Tim Wirth was leading work under the nation’s 1964 Wilderness Act to save land in Colorado that was “untrammeled by man” and “retaining its primeval character.” Fielder went out and photographed pristine terrain for a book circulated to county commissioners, mayors, chambers of commerce, and others whose support was required for the federal government to designate wilderness.

Now retired, Wirth credits Fielder as “an integral part of the effort” that set aside more than 600,000 acres of Colorado as wilderness. Fielder “is a wonderful enthusiast and advocate, and his photos surely helped to persuade many Coloradans to support our work,” Wirth said.

Former Congressman David Skaggs, who carried the Colorado Wilderness Act of 1993 to final passage, said Fielder’s photos “served to convey something spiritual about the wilderness” that may have “seeped into the pores of some of our skeptical colleagues.”

Fielder also lobbied for land preservation through Great Outdoors Colorado, the program voters launched in 1992 directing the use of Colorado Lottery revenues to protect wildlife habitat and river corridors and to improve parks and trails. And as Colorado’s population exploded, reaching 5.87 million this year, he supported environmental projects, such as efforts to ensure sufficient water in the upper Colorado, Yampa, and Dolores rivers and protect the canyons they carve as new wilderness.

“He’s one of the most consequential conservationists in Colorado history,” said Save the Colorado River Director Gary Wocker, a longtime friend. Fielder has focused on “art and beauty. … a side of things that humans value,” Wockner said. “He knew that, by taking these beautiful photos and selling them, he was probably leading more people to visit the places. But he wasn’t just commodifying them. He has dedicated his life to protecting those places — and restoring them.”

Damage over four decades of population growth and urbanization in Colorado could have been worse, Fielder said, lauding voters who sometimes made saving nature a priority. “We have accomplished much in the past 23 years to deflect inappropriate development.”

But he has seen a transformation.

“Back in the 1980s, there just weren’t as many folks hiking and camping for the sake of just getting away from the city to enjoy the sounds, smells, taste, and touch — the sensuousness of nature.” Crowded conditions inside costly Front Range cities increasingly drive more people out. “People follow other people to the same places they read about online.”

Climate warming with temperatures rising nearly twice as fast as the global average in western Colorado is shrinking snow and favoring droughts, ruinous fires, and insect infestations — ravaging forests where he used to shoot photos. “Just about all of our Colorado forests between 10,000 feet and 12,000 feet in elevation now are dead, not to mention 5 million acres of dead lodgepole pine forest at lower elevations. I can no longer make a beautiful photograph of green trees in the foreground of a Rocky Mountain composition. And most of the snow and ice that were remnants of ancient glaciers has melted. I can no longer include in my designs the dramatic contrast of a white glacier nestled in a rocky cirque,” he said.

“As an artist, I am not sure I can deal with that.”

In the future, more people likely will move to western Colorado, requiring the preservation of more natural landscapes, he said, calling for greater funding by Congress and state lawmakers to make sure federal, state and local public land managers can keep ecosystems healthy.

Much will depend on how fast humans address climate change. Another decade of burning fossil fuels, emitting more heat-trapping carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere, “doesn’t bode well for humanity and for biodiversity,” Fielder said. “We can’t stop climate warming, but we can slow it. There’s a difference between a place that is 120 degrees versus a place that is 100 degrees. That increment could make all the difference….The sooner we get out of the oil and gas business, the sooner we are not part of the problem.”

Meanwhile, on his 20 acres of forest and wildflower meadows, Fielder has been basking in the beauty of a place he has protected, stars still visible in the darkness of night, away from traffic and industrial noise, wonders of evolution over 4 billion years on display.

He counted the elk that surrounded his house — more than 30. The mountain grouse at the door, the first of spring, sang as if wild birds no longer were imperiled.

“With this cancer now, I realize how fortunate I am to be in a place like this,” he said. “It makes all the difference in the world, being in the middle of nature.”

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©2023 MediaNews Group, Inc. Visit at denverpost.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

© Photo by Becki Leahy
Canadian Geese are pictured at the Ferry Point Picnic Area in Martinez.

MARTINEZ, CA — Patch reader Becki Leahy captured this image near the Ferry Point Picnic Area in Martinez. It was taken on Feb. 1, 2020, she told Patch.

It appears someone had all their ducks — geese, actually — in a row that day.

Thanks so much for sharing, Becki!

It’s Your Shot: Pictures You Take and We Share

Have you got the next incredible photo? If you have an awesome photo of nature, breathtaking scenery, kids caught being kids, a pet doing something funny or something unusual you happen to catch, we’d love to feature it on Patch. We’re looking for high-resolution images that reflect the beauty that is the East Bay, and that show off your unique talents.

So, bring ’em on. No selfies. Not here.

Send your photos to [email protected]. In your email, please be sure to include information about when and where the shot was taken and any other details about what was going on.

The article Have Your Ducks (Geese) In A Row: Martinez Photo Of The Day appeared first on Martinez Patch.

Nicole Richie shared a sweet family photo on Mother’s Day, including daughter Harlow, 15

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Nicole Richie/instagram

Nicole Richie is celebrating Mother’s Day with the important women in her family.

The former reality star, 41, took to her Instagram Story to share her appreciation for her mother, Brenda Harvey-Richie, including a sweet photo that featured a rare glimpse at daughter Harlow, 15.

“We all love you,” Richie wrote across an image of her mother, her sister Sofia, Harlow, and herself. “Happy Mothers Day Queen.”

Richie also shared several throwback images of her and her mother in the following slides. “Thank you for making sure our fits were right & tight for all of the 80s,” she captioned one. In the photo, Richie and her mother are wearing matching dresses and hairstyles.

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Related:Nicole Richie’s 2 Kids: Everything to Know

Richie shares Harlow and son Sparrow, 13, with her husband Joel Madden, 44. The two have been married since 2010 and are notoriously protective of their kids.

Although Richie rarely shares photos of her kids, she has been open in the past about her parenting experience and the struggles of being a working mom.

“Saying that it is difficult sometimes is very comforting for other women to hear — just knowing that it is a juggle,” the mom of two told PEOPLE in September 2015. “It’s just about doing what you can, finding the balance in your own life … Every family is different, every household is set up differently and it’s just a constant game of prioritizing — it’s like a puzzle every day.”

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Nicole Richie/instagram

In a 2021 interview with Entertainment Tonight, The Simple Life alum shared that daughter Harlow is a fashionista just like her mom. “She takes my clothes all the time,” she said. “I have just started writing an N with a Sharpie on all of my stuff so that [she knows it’s mine].”

Richie has learned a lot about parenting over the past few years, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. She told PEOPLE in July 2021 that although her two kids had different experiences throughout the crisis, she was able to focus on activities that grounded them.

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DMI/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

“I’ve always stressed that going outside and being in nature is important, but it really became a true necessity once everyone was locked into their computers, Zoom work, all of the things. We really had to make an effort to go outside and be in nature and connect to the earth.”

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This month’s Readers Photo Challenge subject of flowers was a popular one. Twenty-eight readers sent in 118 photos. Some traveled far across an ocean to take flower photos, while others looked no farther than their backyards. Some images were of wildflowers, while others photographed cut flowers at home. Here are the top picks.

The No. 1 top pick comes from Janet Baniwich, formerly of Morada but now lives in Billings, Montana. She was visiting her aunt and cousin who live in Interlaken, Switzerland. While walking down the main promenade through the town, she stopped to take a photo of flowers growing in pots and planters along the walkway.

With her Apple iPhone, she captured a colorful scene in distinct layers built upon another. The first tier is a set of small, white flowers in the foreground that help bring the viewers’ eyes into the frame. The second layer is the line of multi-colored tulips through the center of the frame.

The next layer comes in the form of mountains that surround the town. In the center is the snow-covered Jungfrau, at 13,642 feet, one of the main summits of the Bernese Alps. The white of the snow is mirrored in the white flowers at the bottom of the frame. The final layer is a blue sky with wispy white clouds.

Tom LaBounty of Stockton also “built” his image but in a different way. He photographed irises from his front yard that he cut and brought them into his house, where he set up an impromptu studio. He set the flowers against a black background to help them stand out. He illuminated the irises with 4 small LED lights. Two of them were in the front offset at about 45-degree angles. Another light was set behind, and he held the fourth light in his hand to light the top of the flowers. LaBounty used a Fuji GFX100s digital camera to photograph a still-life photo.

Fred Norman of Stockton photographed daisies in his backyard. With his Canon 6D DSLR camera, he captured the vibrant yellow and purple flowers and then sprite a little water on them with a spray bottle to add a few water drops for visual sparkle to the petals. Norman used a Photoshop technique called focus stacking, where several different images are combined to create more depth of field and have more focus than otherwise would have been possible. The result is every flower and petal is tack sharp in the scene.

Story continues

Like Baniewich, Stocktonian Dave Skinner’s photo is an example of layers. But instead of bold colors and shapes, his image is a lesson in subtlety. With his Nikon D7100 DSLR camera equipped with a macro lens, he photographed the delicate petals of a rose at the World Peace Garden in University Park in Stockton. Each petal is layered upon the next with gradually varying shades of pink and some yellow.

Bettina Engelman of Stockton used some subdued light for her flower picture. It was overcast when she went into her backyard and spotted a hibiscus blossom. The cloudy sky creates subtle, elegant lighting to enhance the graceful beauty of the flower. With a 50mm macro lens on her Sony Alpha 7ii digital mirrorless camera, she got close to the flower capturing just the stamen and some of the petals.

Engelman’s husband, Paul Engelman’s flower photo, was enhanced with serendipity. While walking through the Lodi Lake nature area, he spotted some blossoming wild blackberry vines. He moved in close, and as he was framing his Sony A6400 digital mirrorless camera to capture a single flower, a bee buzzed in, looking for some nectar. As the saying goes, luck favors the prepared, and while the bee was unplanned, Engleman captured images that are more than just a simple blossom.

For being first, Janet Baniewich wins a free 16”x20” print of her choice made by UlmerPhoto in Stockton and a $25 gift card to a local eatery. Tom LaBounty wins an 11”x14” print for second, and the third place prize of an 8”x10” print goes to Fred Norman.

All of the photos can be seen in an online gallery at recordnet.com. A new challenge assignment will be issued on May 23.

Record photographer Clifford Oto has photographed Stockton and San Joaquin County for over 38 years. He can be reached at [email protected]. To support local news, subscribe to The Stockton Record at https://www.recordnet.com/subscribenow.

This article originally appeared on The Record: Readers Photo Challenge: Bringing May Flowers

Happy Mother’s Day! Today we thank all of the powerful women that have shaped so many lives. From making sure our bellies are full to protecting us from the outside world, there is so much for which to be thankful. We also recognize all of the wild mothers out there that know how to follow their instincts. Some good, some bad, all extreme.

First on the roster for our extreme mothers in nature is the moose. Known to be one of the most unpredictable and dangerous creatures in Colorado, mother moose are one of the last animals you would want to encounter. We continue to see an increase in moose attacks in Colorado as they are generally unafraid of humans and, surprisingly, not all humans are afraid of them. Due to their poor eyesight, the presence of anyone or anything is enough to startle them and is likely to make them charge toward you, especially in the presence of their kin. The threat of this animal should be enough to convince you to keep your dogs on a leash in wilderness areas.

You might be thinking that black bear mother has to be on the list for one of the most extreme mothers in Colorado. They are in fact, extreme, but not for the reasons you may assume.

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I was a firm believer that mother bears are aggressive when protecting their young and might even be as dangerous as running into a moose. However, this is a common myth. Black bears will give birth in their den during hibernation and tend to their cubs for about a year and a half before getting ready to mate again. Around this time, they begin to push their cubs away.

While this may seem harsh, it is to protect them from males that are looking at the mother for a mate. Sometimes, a mother black bear might even abandon her cubs in the face of an impending threat, which I find to be quite extreme. To further debunk the myth of overprotective bear mothers, they might even abandon a cub completely. While most black bears will give birth to two to three cubs, a mother might abandon a single cub because it is not worth the effort to take care of just one. It’s a cruel world out there!

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The final candidate on the list of extreme mothers is the bald eagle. This mom also gets a lot of help from the father, which is rare for many families in the animal kingdom. Although bald eagles reside in the largest nest of any bird in North America, the nest building takes less than a week. With a platform high in the sky, plenty of time, large sticks, and feathers plucked from the mother, the nest will be ready to protect the eaglets, or baby eagles.

Once the nestlings are hatched, the mother will spend 90% of her time protecting them in the nest. The mother will keep the babies warm during blustery storms and even spread her wings to provide shade on sunnier days. Contrary to popular belief, the eagles are not pushed from their nest. The mother eagle prolongs her dedication to make sure her offspring are safe, continuing to provide food and encourage them to take flight and land at nearby trees. This can be considered closer to gentle parenting than extreme. Nonetheless, as any mother, their dedication is admirable.

Whether or not you and your mother get along, mothers bring us into this world and give us a chance to enjoy everything our world has to offer. Today and everyday, their sacrifices should be recognized and appreciated. Cheers to the mothers who have raised us, influenced those that were not their own, and the ones we miss.

Maddie Weinhold is a former naturalist at Walking Mountains Science Center. She wants everyone to respect their motherly figures today and every day, especially Mother Nature.

Of all the things America invented, the greatest might have been childhood.

The nation’s Child Labor Act of 1916 finally freed youngsters from toiling in factories or laboring in coal mines. The post-war prosperity of the ‘50s gave tweens and teens pocket money, social lives, and freedom. After years of being seen as simply smaller adults, by the mid-20th century children were finally fully themselves.

Those are among the insights in Todd Brewster’s “American Childhood: A Photographic History.”

It’s a sometimes lovely, often saddening saga of centuries of kids at play and work, skipping in the sunshine or struggling to survive. And it all began with Brewster’s massive treasure hunt.

“Over the past five years, I have been gathering up vintage images of children, some that stared out at me from piles in well-picked-over baskets at flea markets and thrift shops,” he writes. “I looked through the work of the world’s most distinguished photojournalism agency, Magnum … I skimmed community bulletin boards.”

His goal, he writes, was to see childhood “through the eyes of children.”

What they saw wasn’t always pretty, as some of the earliest photos show.

Johnny Clem was only 10 when he joined the Union Army as a “regimental mascot and emergency drummer boy.” The youngest soldier in the Civil War saw action at the Battle of Chickamauga, even wounding the Confederate officer who tried to take him prisoner. Luckily, Johnny survived the war and went on to a military career, rising to the rank of brigadier general.

Unluckier was Edwin Jemison of the 2nd Louisiana Infantry Regiment, who signed up at 16 and promptly perished at the 1862 Battle of Malvern Hill. “Nobly did he, although but a child in years, sustain himself in the front rank of the soldier and gentleman until the moment of his death,” according to his admiring obituary in the Southern Recorder. He was buried on the battlefield.

America grew quickly after the Civil War, and the labor of children helped that growth. They sewed clothes, picked cotton, and hunted whales. By the turn of the century, 2 million people — roughly a fifth of the workforce — were under 15.

In 1907, a private organization, the National Child Labor Committee, hired pioneering photojournalist Lewis Hine to document those lives. “Hine’s pictures showed weary children younger in years than their wounded faces would suggest, often with bodies badly disfigured and torn,” Brewster writes.

One nameless girl stands stoically between rows of machines in a South Carolina mill. One boy displays a roughly bandaged hand; he lost two fingers in an industrial accident. When factories barred Hine from entering, he would “follow them home, where he discovered working families living in squalor. The resulting photos served their purpose.”

Life may have been less physically dangerous for Richard Pierce, a messenger for Western Union, but he was already an old man at 14, scowling suspiciously at the camera. Pierce, Hine noted in 1910, works 11 hours a day, and during his time off, “smokes and visits houses of prostitution.”

Pictures like Hines’ helped show the actual cost of child labor, and eventually, legislators began putting new safeguards in place. Poverty remained in place, too — as photographs here of the Great Depression or the segregated South — prove. But the book’s photos of children at work begin to give way to pictures of them at play or school.

A photo from a 1948 story in Life magazine on the “kid geniuses” at the still-new Hunter College Elementary School depicts its gifted children. The day the photojournalist visited, the original caption explains, she found “a seven-year-old presenting a lecture to the school’s science club on the behavior of neutrons in uranium, a six-year-old summarizing her library research on the nature of time, two other seven-year-olds playing chess, and a ten-year-old girl learning how to conduct an orchestra.”

A picture from another school, the Intercommunal Youth Institute in Oakland, Calif., was founded to educate the children of Black Panther Party members — and to indoctrinate them in “the true nature of this decadent American society.” Taken in 1971, the photograph shows 12 young students standing at attention, wearing uniforms and signature Panther black berets. Party founder Huey P. Newton looks down on them from a poster on the wall.

There are also shots of children in less structured, more unguarded moments. A young girl cuddles her kitten, surrounded by the rubble of a house destroyed by a Missouri tornado in 1957. Deep in parallel play in 1987, several children supervise the toy trains at Manhattan’s F.A.O. Schwarz. In 1970s Little Italy, teenagers, alternately awkward and cocky, clown and court at a public pool. In 2014 Texas, adolescent cowpokes solemnly prepare for the Youth Bull Riders World Finals.

Some photos demonstrate stark contrasts. An image from 1957 shows a family in Reidsville, Ga., proudly decorating their car for a Knights of the Ku Klux Klan parade, their little girl eager to help. There, in 1961 Jackson, Miss., are the mugshots of two teenage freedom riders. The white teen, Margaret Leonard, was 19. The black child, Hezekiah Watkins, was 13. When arrested, he was locked up with adult criminals.

“The only thing I want to do is see my mother,” he told a reporter. “I recall crying every night and every day.”

These teenagers, fighting for voting rights, were heroes but never celebrities. Other children pictured here became famous later, sometimes through violence — there’s a photo of a youthful Unabomber — but more often through an enormous talent. Little Lady Gaga poses in front of the family fireplace. Young Janis Joplin shows off her Bluebird uniform and cracks an enormous grin.

There are pictures of a baby Lucille Ball and child stars Judy Garland and Shirley Temple. As she reached adulthood, Temple discovered that “her father had squandered the millions that she had made.” Another star who started very young was comic genius Buster Keaton. At age 3, he was hauled onstage to join his family’s vaudeville team; much of the act involved his father throwing the resilient toddler around the stage.

Child welfare agencies were concerned, but “we always managed to get around the law,” Keaton coolly explained years later. “The law read ‘no child under the age of sixteen shall do acrobatics, walk wire, play musical instruments, trapeze’ – and it named everything. But none of them said you couldn’t kick him in the face.”

Keaton spent his life in show business. He would go on to make and lose fortunes. But no matter how famous or how much he earned, was his childhood all that different from the little girl forced to toil in the cotton mills of South Carolina? Did he have a childhood at all?

“What have we learned from children?” Brewster asks. “The most obvious lesson is that we have not always appreciated children for their own sake; in fact, we have rarely done so. Instead, we have abused children we have profited from them. We have dismissed them as inconsequential … Most of all, we Americans, like centuries of other peoples who came before us, have asserted the primacy of those things that children need to learn from us — and only rarely reflected on what we might learn from them.”

©2023 New York Daily News. Visit nydailynews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

A local artist is using his photography to tell his COVID story and capture the hardships and humor of the pandemic.

The Museum of the City of New York has opened a new exhibit focused on the concept of what home means to New Yorkers. Part of the collection like at the pandemic and the ongoing challenges left in its wake.

“New York Now: Home” features photography and video works made over the past several years that capture the changes across the five boroughs.

The artists featured capture the experiences of New Yorkers and shed light on life in the city before, during and after the pandemic.

Neil Kramer is a photographer who captured the drastic changes we all experienced during the pandemic by documenting his personal experience in the spring of 2020.

“It was definitely an experience of love and dealing with family responsibility during a traumatic time,” Neil said.

Neil’s mom and ex-wife came to stay with him for what was supposed to be a short visit.

“Then March hits, Queens was the epicenter of the pandemic,” Neil said.

The trio hunkered down inside Neil’s two-bedroom apartment in Queens and he started taking pictures. He said it was his way of coping with the seismic shift in how we all lived.

“This was what we did to calm our nerves and to be artistic,” Neil said.

At first, the images were light in nature, but after about a year the tone was heavier as things changed in his building.

“People died on our floor we got a little lonely,” Neil said.

Some of Neil’s images tie back to real moments that he’s recreated. He’s still documenting the aftermath of the pandemic and posting it all on Instagram where to his surprise he gets messages from strangers.

“It makes me more aware for many people the pandemic is not exactly over,” Neil said.

The exhibit is on view through August and tickets can be purchased at the museum’s website.

ALSO READ | SNEAK PEEK: American Museum of Natural History opening state-of-the-art science center

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A popular photo of a female Florida panther, with her kitten trailing behind, is set to be the third image featured on the state’s “Protect the Panther” specialty vehicle tag.

The picture was taken in 2018 by famed National Geographic photographer Carlton Ward Jr. on the Babcock Ranch, which is about 15 miles north of Fort Myers and just north of the Caloosahatchee River, when the panther duo tripped one of his remote cameras.

“It’s the most important picture of my career so far because of what it means, what it represents, for the recovery of our state animal,” Ward said. “The photograph shows this female panther being trailed by a recently born Florida panther kitten, bringing a new generation of panther to the northern Everglades since 1973.”

Specialty license plates are a popular option in the Sunshine State, which has about 130 designs to choose from. Just more than two million specialty plates are bolted to Florida vehicles right now.

The top two plates are the sunset-colored “Endless Summer” plate with a shadowed image of a surfboard, and the “Save The Manatee” plate, featuring a cartoon depiction of a sea cow.

Long ago, the Florida panther’s range included most of the American southeast, but during the last several centuries their area declined to South Florida, mostly to below Lake Okeechobee. Depending on the agency doing the counting there are about 175 Florida panthers left in the wild.

The extra money added to a vehicle’s registration and tag, currently $25, goes to the Florida Panther Research and Management Trust Fund, which the state says supports panther-related research, rescue and conservation activities.

That is why Ward’s picture of the mom and her kitten, captured north of the Caloosahatchee River that flows from the western bank of the Big Lake southwest into the Gulf of Mexico near Fort Myers, is so important — it captures the hopes of many panther-lovers that the animal is in the midst of a resurgence.

The money, and other tax dollars, also go to secure land for the panthers to roam, forage, and do what panthers do when – the point is – nobody’s around.

For example, earlier this year, some of the money raised by the sale of the license tags was used to pay the owners of the Hendrie Ranch in Highlands County to buy their rights to develop — in this case never develop — 661 acres along the Florida Wildlife Corridor, an 18-million-acre network of public and private lands, waterways, and wildlife habitats that stretches from the Everglades in the south to the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission worked with Ward Florida to design the new plate, which is currently undergoing final preparation. The new panther plate should be available for sale by the end of the year.

“It’s definitely a big honor to have one of my photographs used on the new Florida panther license palate,” Ward said. “The picture they chose represents the recovery of the Florida panther, not just the South Florida panther but truly the ‘Florida panther’ once again.”

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