Taking a photography break at Fort Ord in Monterey County

My first camera was an Instamatic with rotating flash cubes, a gift from my parents. I shot what my family could afford in film, which meant a few blurry pictures 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 lost her home, her father, her sister, her pets. She told me about the beauty of the Baltics, about my grandads Latvian trotters, about the river by her family’s farm that froze in the winter, then thawed as the downy birches opened their buds. It was a nature I’d never seen, in a land they’d lost.

My parents wanted us to know a world proximate to theirs, so, my dad, an engineer, accepted an aviation job in Europe. I was five when we left the States, wearing a hand-sewn bonnet and clutching a stuffed animal wearing Pan Am wings.

Years later, when we returned to the States, I felt split and splintered— repatriated, but not really, with a foot on each continent but belonging to neither. Being peripheral that way taught me to notice the peripheral — the odd ones out like me — which informs the way I see the world through my lens. It probably also accounts for why my eye was drawn to anomalies … like the tiny movements of injured animals.

I was often finding animals in need of care, so about 20 years ago my partner and I put on volunteer aprons at a Bay Area wildlife 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”— a “him” or a “her” scared because my human hand was supposed to be her mother.

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, not fully understanding back then how I was encroaching or disturbing.

Through my lens I try to show what it means to share our space with other species thoughtfully. I post my photos as an invitation 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; an old bull elk bugles behind a scrim of falling snow; or, a pod of orcas passes so close I can hear a mother and calf breathe in sync with each other and the pulse of the Salish Sea.

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 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 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