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.

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, the discovery of my new local coffee shop or movie theater, the persistence of nature, cycling through its familiar motions, giving form to flux, offering belonging in estrangement.

That belonging turned out to be durable in ways nothing else was. When life later handed me its harder chapters — illness, loss, the long work of survival — nature remained a constant. It forced me to pay attention, to sit still and watch a thing unfold without rushing it toward meaning. Some of my favorite photographic experiences are the unheralded, uncharismatic ones, like lying on a Mendocino beach, watching beach hoppers tussle over their burrows before sinking into the sand at sunrise.

Nature — at once  lovely, poignant, and unpredictable — helped me accept that grief 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.

My connection with 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.

My long lens became a way to observe these same wild lives away from the hospital, without the proximity that collapses observation into intrusion. Through that lens, I could see their eyes assessing me in return, as either interloper or inert. It made me retreat from how I used to traipse through nature, loving it but not fully understanding back then how I was encroaching or disturbing.

Through that lens I try to show what it means to share our space with other species thoughtfully and through images, to step inside that world, their world … to imagine what it might actually be like to walk in their paws, claws, and hooves.

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, a pod of orcas passes so close I can hear a mother and calf breathe in sync with each other and with the pulse of the Salish Sea.

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

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