Well gang, I'm back from my trek down to Guyana. The actual travel was... interesting, to say the least. I got back on Monday, whereupon my computer promptly crashed hard after downloading about 20 Gig of images. 
The good news is that I had almost everything on my PC backed up, especially since the crash took my boot drive with it.
Anyhow after days of debugging the darn thing, I finally got it working again on Friday night. I would have loved to dig into the Guyana images, but I've been asked to do my first photo exhibition, and they already knew which images they wanted, so I've been busy all weekend with those.
I did manage to process just a quick handful of images to post here for a starter. I haven't really gone through and sorted the images, so this is a real potpourri. I will say that I really, really wished I had rented a 300 f/4L IS (or better still a 300 f/2.8L IS) for this trip. I love my 400 f/5.6L, but it's not much good in a moving boat. 99% of the images I took from the boat (which is about 90% of the images overall) were taken with my 70-200 f/2.8L IS with the 1.4 extender.
In any event, here is a little taste. Mostly otters. Later I'll have capybaras, cayman, iguanas, and birds, birds, birds, in addition to more otter photos.
The only Giant Otter family that we saw in the wild was the group known as the K-group. We saw signs of two other families in their respective territories - dens that were in use, and what the scientists refer to as "campsites" where the otters will mark their territories. Here are some of the K-group. The adult with the visible neck patches is known as Shy. This group had 3 adults and 3 cubs. In this image we see two adults and one cub. The cub is in the middle.
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We stayed at the Karanambu Ranch, which is run by Diane (pronounced dee-ann) McTurk. She was born in Guyana on the 125 square mile ranch that her father established in 1913, but went to Britain for her education. She is one of the sweetest people in the world. In addition, she has had unprecedented success in rehabilitating carnivores (in this case otters) and successfully releasing them back into their natural habitat. This is very difficult to do with carnivores in particular. Diane went out with us nearly every day on our research trips. In addition, she was rehabilitating two different otters - which had still not met each other. The older otter is Sappho. Sappho is 1 1/2 years old, about 3 1/2 feet long (Giant otters will often get over 6 feet long). Sappho is a real sweetheart. Here is just one of many photos that I have of Sappho. Too bad about the background in this one, but her photo is pretty cute, so I grabbed this one for now. There will be better ones later.
The other otter in rehab is Tsunami. Tsunami was found washed up on a beach, totally emaciated a bout an month and 1/2 ago. Tsunami is believed to be about 3 1/2 months old. I left the Amerind boy's feet in the first photo for size reference. Ricky is about 13 years old.
There were also lots of very cool birds around. As I mentioned, I did not have the ideal lens for this trip. Here is one that I particularly like because of the composition. I've got closer images, and probably some shaper images of other birds, but I really like the look of this photo of a Black Collared Hawk.
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That's all for now. Hopefully I get more time to go through these photos over the next week or so. Hope you enjoyed them as much as I enjoyed taking them!
= Ed =
