Just in time for the holidays. My new children’s book, Whose Butt, is not available at your favorite book store or at www.amazon.com or www.adventurepublications.net. See below.

This is a funny book that celebrates cute animal butts.

In part 1 of my recent trip to coastal Alaska we had very close encounter with a mating pair of Brown Bears. After nearly a week photographing the bears we flew out of the wilderness and back to the Kenai Peninsula. From this location we would launch on two separate boat charters in search of Sea Otters and birds. Sea Otters are the largest member of the weasel family with adult males weight in about 70-75 lbs and adult females ranging around 60-65 lbs. This might not sound like much but when you get up close you notice just how large these marine mammals can be.

Sea Otters are about 5 feet in length making them about the length of a small person and when you see them floating in the water it almost reminds you of a young person in the water.

So the goal of this part of the trip is to charter a boat, go out and find some sea otters and see if we can get close enough to get a few pictures. We started in Seward AK with a charter boat who thought they knew where the otters hung out. Clouds and light rain was no deterrent for us. Before we knew it we were racing across three foot waves with water splashing out from around the bow of the boat. Two hours in we started to realize that perhaps our captain didn’t know where the otters were hanging out. He suggested heading 7 miles out into the open water for a sea lion hall-out, but warned us that the seas were going to be 6-8 foot high and the boat would be thrown around like we were in a washing machine. There was no way we were going to head out into this kind of seas so we turned back and headed for the docks.

Upon returning to the docks we found a couple otters hanging out right where we started our journey. We spent the rest of our charter time photographing the otters within eyesight of the dock. Funny how things turn out.

The following day we moved operations to Homer AK and again chartered a boat. This time we were confident we would find otters because we had photographed otters here before and the captain of the boat definitely knew what he was doing. Again we loaded up on the boat with all the camera gear and headed out in the Kachemak Bay. It wasn’t 30 minutes before we came across our first otters. A small family unit was hanging out in the kelp beds alongside of a small island. Let me tell you, there were a lot of smiling faces on the boat.

After a short time of about 10 minutes with these otters we moved on to look for more. Next we found a mother with a tiny baby resting on her belly. Otter babies are only 5 pounds at birth and are covered in a thick brown fur. They are tiny in comparison to their mothers. They spend most of their time sleeping on their mother’s belly. Occasionally the mother will let her baby float on the ocean’s surface when she dives. This happened just once while we were photographing and it was funny to see the tiny baby just floating and sleeping all by itself.

All total we found about 12-15 otters over the 4 or 5 hours. Each other gave us some opportunity to capturing some really nice images. Needless to say we were thrilled to have spent such quality time with these amazing creatures of the sea. Until next time.

Stan Tekiela is an author / naturalist and wildlife photographer who travels the US to study and photograph wildlife. He can be followed on Facebook.com and Twitter.com. He can also be contacted via his web page at www.naturesmart.com.