Taking a photography break at Fort Ord in Monterey County

A few years ago, I spent three days staring at a mud flat in Marina del Rey … or at least that’s how it looked to every pedestrian brushing past me on the walkway. A few people took out their earbuds to ask what I was photographing. 

My answer: “fiddler crabs.” The response from almost everyone was: “Huh.” Then, earbuds back in the ears.

I get a little geeky over nature scenes people tend to walk past — the small dramas happening in leaves, mud, sand, tide pools. This muddy flat was like moonscape full of burrows, all guarded by crabs with just one claw and huge pincer that served as a boxing glove.

Moving to Europe 

My first camera was an Instamatic with rotating flash cubes, a gift from my parents. I shot only what my family could afford in Agfa film, which meant a few blurry pictures here and there of my siblings, our cat, my Baba, and some Corinthian columns.

My parents were refugees who’d fled Latvia during World War II. My mother told me about the beauty of the Baltic, the amber nuggets on the beach, the river by her family’s farm freezing in winter and thawing as the downy birches opened their buds. It was a nature I’d never seen, in a land they’d lost.

They wanted us to know a world proximate to theirs, so my dad leaped at an aviation job opening in Europe. I was five when I left the States wearing a hand-sewn bonnet and carrying my stuffy named Mousey …who got herself a set of Pan Am wings from a flight attendant named Ellie.

Years later, back in the States as a teenager — repatriated, but not really — I felt split and splintered, with a foot on each continent and but belonging nowhere. Being peripheral that way probably taught me to notice the peripheral.

I wondered if some part of my brain was hearing whispers from lizards because how else did injured animals always find me? And usually at the worst possible time, on the way to work or right about midnight. My partner and I couldn’t ignore the injured animals we’d come across … but we couldn’t always help.

We tried. We found vets who could treat birds, or drove miles to wildlife hospitals set in canyons and forests. But, I knew we needed skills we didn’t have.

That deficit and a cat named Jackie (another story) led us both to volunteer positions at a Bay Area wildlife hospital.

As volunteers, masked and gloved in small treatment rooms, we learned to give meds to head-injured waxwings, who could only wobble after crashing head on into windows. We fed baby House Finches, orphaned by tree trimmers or cat claws, open beaks in paper nests, tiny syringes, every hour, repeat.

I started to appreciate the relentless work birds endure to grow their hatchlings into fledglings, dawn to dusk, every hour, for weeks. And I saw what happened when that work was interrupted by humans, cars, windows, cats, bullets, fishing line, poison.

That experience taught me to photograph with respect and distance. I used long lenses. If I noticed an animal changing behavior because of me — if she stopped feeding, if he moved away, if I heard alarm calls — I stepped back. And, as time went on, I met others who felt the same, a community of wildlife photographers who cared more about the animal than the shot.

Outside the hospital, I observed so many wild animals adapting to —or sometimes suffering from —human-altered environments. I wanted to document that, the convergence zones where nature meets urban sprawl — the places I’ve also lived. So many species are at risk globally and, to me, this is the ecological story of our times.

It’s been years since I took my first wildlife shot, and I still get excited about every tiny encounter, and every spectacle of the bigger magic, when: ten thousand Snow Geese lift off from a rice field in a white blaze; or, an old bull elk bugles behind a scrim of falling snow; or, a pod of orcas passes so close I can hear mama and calf breathe, in sync with each other and the pulse of the Salish Sea.

Through my lens I try to show what it means to share space with other species thoughtfully, and what it might actually be like to walk in their paws, claws, and hooves, surviving and thriving inside and outside our infrastructure and constructs.

My guiding principle, always, is putting the animal’s welfare above the photo.

In October 2022, I was certified with Community Active Wildlife Stewards (CAWS) — a recognition program for businesses and others demonstrating wildlife stewardship, and designed to encourage responsible wildlife viewing guidelines.

• May 2024 to present: Volunteer Naturalist – Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary – Public education on MBNMS and Monterey Bay/Pacific coast wildlife

• 2016 to 2020:  Ethics Committee for the North American Nature Photography Association – promoting standards of ethical practice in the field of wildlife photography.

• 2012: Co-founder Wildlife Conservation Pass Project— a grassroots project to implement a new revenue pass for our National Wildlife Refuge system.

• 2009: 24-hour Hazwoper certification for oil spill response

• 2009: Wildlife rescue field response training (Wildlife Emergency Services)

• 2005 to 2010: Lindsay Wildlife Hospital volunteer

• 2004: Volunteer for Emergency Animal Rescue disaster response

•  International Bird Rescue

•  Empirical Magazine.

• Science
• U.S. Fish and Wildlife Magazine
• Colorado Review
• Functional Ecology Magazine
• Penguin Publishing’s Morning Glory Novel
• Puget Sound Partnership’s State of the Sound

Organizational + Publications including:

• Defenders of Wildlife
• Coastal California: The Wildlife (w/Jeff Corwin)
• Bay Nature
• Ocean Conservancy
• California Council for Wildlife Rehabilitators
• Elakha Alliance

[A more complete list of credits is here: Published Images]

In addition to my photography, I’m a freelance writer and an independent book researcher (15 years). My work is credited in more than 25 James Patterson/Maxine Paetro books, including Women’s Murder Club, Private, and Confessions series.

In the years prior, I wrote and edited the San Francisco travel website for About.com, worked as a freelance writer, and wrote a regular column for a national health magazine. My previous background was in administration, working in various fields including entertainment.

Enjoy your browsings and thanks for stopping by. For all uses or permissions of images posted here, please feel free to contact me for the specs.

Photos, writings, and graphics © Ingrid Valda Taylar