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 Shoreline 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 was 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.

Taking a photography break at Fort Ord in Monterey County

I grew up in the space between places. I was a third culture kid, living in one country, then another. I learned early that home is not a fixed address. When pressed to describe my idea of “home” in an expository writing class, I wrote about airports and the familiar scent of jet fuel.

My roots, my heritage were Baltic. I was born to Latvian refugee parents who carried the loss of a homeland across an ocean to the U.S., then back across the Atlantic to our expat lives in Europe when I was four years old. Displacement, in my family, was inheritance before it was ever my own experience.

For me, home was something I carried, something I found, or something that grounded me. It could be a new library card each time I moved or the discovery of my new local coffee shop. And, it was the persistence of nature, the annual cycles and familiar motions, that gave form to flux, and offered belonging in estrangement

That belonging turned out to be durable in ways nothing else was. When life later handed me its harder chapters — the strains of illness, loss, the long work of survival — nature remained a constant. The natural life around me — at once  lovely, poignant, and unpredictable — helped me see that grief, hardship, gratitude, and wonder can occupy the same space in a single afternoon. It helped me accept and even embrace the complexity of an existence filled with gray areas. Wildlife photography is so much about stillness and presence — sitting and watching a thing unfold without rushing it toward any outcome or meaning.

I’m especially drawn to the extraordinary lives and behaviors of the ordinary birds and animals. Some of my favorite photographic experiences are the unheralded, uncharismatic ones that connect me with my citizen science passions. While looking for a scenic beach in Mendocino County one day, our trail collapsed into a washout. Disappointed, I plopped down in the sand to contemplate next steps when I saw the sand seeming to bubble up next to me. A look through my lens revealed a bustling community of California beach hoppers, tussling with each other outside their burrows above the wrack line. I snapped photos of them until the first light of sunrise, when they all then crept into their little homes.

My love for animals led me to wildlife rehab about 20 years ago, as a volunteer in a Bay Area hospital. Masked and gloved in small treatment rooms, we learned how to medicate cedar waxwings who’d flown head first into glass. We cleaned baby bird incubators, and fed young squirrels displaced by tree trimmers.

In those rooms, I witnessed the relentless, dawn-to-dusk labor of wild animals raising their hatchlings and babies. And, I saw what happened when that work was interrupted by humans, cars, windows, cats, bullets, fishing line, poison. The little raccoon kit refusing to eat was a “who” not an “it”— scared because my human hand was supposed to be his mother.

In the process of helping care for these injured beings, I realized I had to more deeply understand their natural history to be an effective advocate for their protection. My camera became the alchemist’s flask, effectively transmuting what I saw and experienced in the field, into the words and images that carried my respect and love for these animals. And my volunteer work morphed from rescue into advocacy into ocean naturalist training which is my current labor of love.

My telephoto lens is a way to watch and document wild animals without the proximity that collapses observation into intrusion. Through my lens, I can see their eyes sometimes watching me in return, deciding if I’m interloper or inert. This interaction made me reconfigure my relationship to wild animals, and over time I learned better ways to observe without encroaching or disturbing. My guiding principle, always, is putting the animal’s welfare above the photo.

Through my lens I try to show what it means to share our space with other species thoughtfully. And through the power of imagery, we can all step inside that world, their world through our imagination,  and consider what it might be like to walk in their paws, claws, and hooves.

It’s been more than 20 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, a pod of orcas passes so close to our Zodiac that I can hear a mother and calf breathe in sync with each other and with the pulse of the sea.

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