Tim Laman

| Wildlife Photojournalist

Wildlife Diaries

The Wildlife Diaries newsletter is the best way to keep up to date with Tim Laman’s latest work and travels, and to learn about photography and natural history as well. Read through his recent posts here or sign up to receive the posts via email using the form on the right.

Wildlife Diaries

Happy New Year 2022!

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Dear Friends,

For a little inspiration as 2022 begins, I’m sharing an image of a pair of Red-crowned Cranes performing a duet in a snowstorm.  In Japan, where I made this image, cranes are a symbol of happiness, good luck, and long life.  Despite the blizzard, this pair is thinking ahead to the spring nesting season, and calling together to reinforce their pair bond.  Looking beyond the storm to a brighter, hopeful future that we can reach through working together – these cranes seemed a fitting metaphor for getting through the tough times we are in right now and being positive about the future.

Red-crowned Crane pair in a snowstorm, Hokkaido, Japan Endangered Species (IUCN Red List: EN).A pair of Red-crowned Cranes perform a courtship duet during a snowstorm in Hokkaido, Japan.

I am exited about 2022 and all the things I have in the works.  Besides making plans to get back to shooting in some of my favorite places like Borneo, I am also hard at work on my new book of bird photography from all over the world titled “BIRD PLANET” that will be published later this year.  The images here are some of the selects being considered for my Japan chapter.  I had a great time reviewing my entire archive of bird photography in 2021, collecting my published favorites, but also finding unpublished gems that came to light during this deep dive into the archive.  If you happen to be a fan of birds and bird photography, I think you’ll enjoy the images and stories behind them that I plan to share throughout the year ahead in this newsletter and on my social channels.

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Ways You Can Help Orangutans this Giving Tuesday

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Dear Friends,

It’s Giving Tuesday today, and I hope you are giving some thought to how you can help out the causes you care about.  Here at Tim Laman Photography, we are supporting our long-term partner the “Gunung Palung Orangutan Conservation Program” and their campaign “Save Wild Orangutans”.

Here are four ways you can be engaged:

  1. Make a one-time donation HERE.   https://www.savewildorangutans.org/donate/
  2. Join the Team!  Sign up to make a monthly donation HERE.  https://www.savewildorangutans.org/join-the-team/.   As a perk of being a regular donor, even for a small amount like $5 or $10/month, you will receive our “Orangutan Diaries” updates from the field.
  3. Buy an Orangutan print today.  It’s the last day of our Holiday Print Sale, and 50% of profits will be donated directly to Save Wild Orangutans.  Visit my gallery HERE.  https://www.timlamanfineart.com/orangutans
  4. Join my Live Art Sale & Conservation Fundraiser tomorrow, Dec 1 at 6PM Eastern.  I will be selling prints from my inventory here in the studio.  Half of profits from orangutan prints will also be donated to Save Wild Orangutans, and there are many unique orangutan prints in this collection.  Check my Instagram or FB tomorrow Dec 1 for details.

Mist in the Canopy, Gunung Palung

At SAVE WILD ORANGUTANS, the orangutans themselves are of course the key flagship species we focus attention on.  But what wild orangutans need is healthy rainforest habitat like the lowland forest of Gunung Palung, pictured above.  When we work to protect habitat for orangutans, we save the entire spectrum of biodiversity in the rich lowland forests of Borneo.  So please think about that as you contemplate how you can help this Giving Tuesday.  You can learn a lot more about all the ways the team in Indonesia is working toward this goal of forest habitat protection at the main website www.savegporangutans.org.

The Incredible Biodiversity of Gunung Palung

As one of the very best remaining lowland forests in all of Borneo, Gunung Palung harbors an incredible variety of creatures besides orangutans.  Here are just a few examples:

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Orangutan Print Sale for Conservation

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2021 has been another unusual year, but I’m still feeling thankful.  This thanksgiving holiday, I want to help raise awareness and support for Orangutan Conservation in Borneo.  I hope you will take a moment to read on.  

As those of you who have followed my work for a while know, documenting the lives of wild orangutans in partnership with my wife, researcher Cheryl Knott, has been a major part of my life’s work over that past 25 years.  Using the media I create to spread the word in National Geographic articles and films has been a big part of what I do.  But it has now been two years since I was last in Borneo in documenting orangutans.  Yet, we are fortunate that the non-profit group Cheryl founded, now run in Indonesia by an Indonesian team of over thirty people, have been able to persist throughout the pandemic in their conservation, education, and community support activities that all help to protect orangutans in Gunung Palung, one of the world’s most important remaining wild orangutan sanctuaries. 

So I’m very thankful to them and for all their efforts, and I’m dedicating this newsletter and print-sale fundraiser to the Gunung Palung Orangutan Project!

Please scan below for ways you can help this important cause.

That Special Connection
Young orangutans typically spend eight years or more with their mothers, and this is my favorite image that captures that special connection.  I think it is also worth contemplating our close connection to orangutans and their rainforest habitat.  The future of orangutans and all the diverse life on earth is dependent on good decisions being made by us humans who have taken over so much of the planet.  Our individual decisions matter, and supporting groups actively working to accomplish conservation on the ground is one small way we can help.  
This photograph is available as a print along with all the other orangutan images on sale now for my Giving Tuesday fundraiser (I will donate 50% of profits from all orangutan print sales to the Gunung Palung Orangutan Project).

Ways You Can Help Support Orangutans

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Birds-of-Paradise and Orangutan Fundraiser is Live

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As we near the holiday season I’m reminded once again of how fortunate my family and I have been to weather this pandemic relatively unscathed.  I hope you have been as fortunate, though I’m sure some of you suffered losses of loved ones, and my heartfelt sympathies go out to you.  It’s been a tough couple years.  

As we get through this, I am feeling like I want to devote some energy and resources to helping out the people and conservation activities that I care deeply about in Indonesia, where things have been especially tough.  The best way I can come up with to do that, is to raise funds by selling my art, so I want to let you know that for all bird-of-paradise and orangutan print purchases during my Holliday Sale, which is now live, I will donate 50% of profits to the two charities that I have been supporting the Gunung Palung Orangutan Conservation Program, and Papua Konservasi dan Komunitas.

Please visit my online gallery through the link below, and consider a purchase for yourself or as a gift.  You can read more about the two organizations in the links below as well.

Vogelkop Superb Bird-of-Paradise
The Vogelkop Superb Bird-of-Paradise.  The discovery that this bird had a distinct display behavior and that I made with Ed Scholes helped to confirm that it deserved to be a distinct species.  We published this in a paper in 2018, and that has been one of the highlights of our 15 year quest to document birds-of-paradise in the wild.  The reason I share this again now, is that the realization that this was a distinct species that could only be seen in the Arfak Mountains of West Papua, helped to drive an increasing number of birdwatchers to the area.  The local people who we worked with to make the discovery, and who own the land, expanded the guesthouses in their villages, and were starting to see that they could create an economy around grass-roots ecotourism.  Protecting their forests and their birds could create more long term benefits for them then exploiting the forest in the short term.  These were great developments.  And the potential is still there for this movement to grow and expand to more villages and communities across Papua and help maintain a green future.  However the pandemic has thrown a wrench into this promising development as visitors have been unable to go to Indonesia and all birding tours have been cancelled for nearly two years now.  The small NGO I work with, Papua Konservasi, has been sending donations directly to villages to help them get by during this time.  Any purchase you make of a bird-of-paradise print during my sale will help this cause, so thanks for your consideration.  Helping support these local landowners, the guardians of the forests where birds-of-paradise live, is the most direct way I can think of to help the birds.  And of course protecting these forest in Papua is also a key to mitigating climate change.  So its a win-win all around.

Vogelkop Superb Bird-of-Paradise Performing is now available for purchase in my fine art store HERE.

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Maine’s Fall Splendor

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I hope you are all doing well, and if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, have been able to get out and enjoy the fall season.  Since I’m not traveling internationally quite yet, I took the chance to spend time up in Maine earlier this month, where the fall foliage this year was quite extraordinary, and I thought I’d take this chance to share a few of my new images.  

You can also scroll down and check out my latest idea on how to share my images and spread our shared love of birds.  I’ve created a line of 5×7 inch greeting cards featuring my backyard birds-in-the-snow and other images.  Have a look and maybe you’ll find one that will make a perfect holiday card.

My timing was perfect on my trip to Acadia National Park this October, and the fall colors were at their peak.  After passing Upper Hadlock Pond and seeing the potential for a beautiful image of the hillside with the amazingly variety of color in the trees, I kept checking back to try to get the right conditions.  I actually waited till after sunset on this day, when the afterglow reflecting from clouds in the West lit the scene evenly.  The wind also died at sunset, as often happens, and I got the perfect reflection that I was hoping for.  For you photography enthusiasts who like to hear these details, I made the broad panoramic image below taking a series of seven vertical images, each about 50% overlapping, and used Lightroom to stitch them together.  Since nothing was moving in the scene, this worked beautifully, and the result is very high resolution file that I could easily print ten feet across if I wanted.  The square portion above it just a section from the center of the larger image.  I love the amazing variety of hues of yellow, orange, pink, and red that came out in the trees under this soft light.  And of course, a perfect reflection just ads a lot to an image.  
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Save Wild Orangutans and get a Free Print

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As many of you know, my longest term personal photography project is documenting the orangutans of Gunung Palung, in support of the science and conservation work of my wife Cheryl Knott’s project and her NGO, the Gunung Palung Orangutan Conservation Program (a US 501c3).

So it is my pleasure to offer some free prints to supporters this month.  We are attempting to build some “crowd sourced” funding for the organization, so that we can grow our education and conservation programs in the communities around the park, with the aim of long term forest and buffer zone preservation for orangutans and all the other biodiversity.

I hope you will consider becoming a monthly contributor.  Any small donation is welcome, but if you are able to commit to $10/month or more, you will receive your choice of one of three of my prints shown below in December, in time for Christmas.  So you could keep it for yourself or give it away as a gift!  Please go to this LINK to learn more and sign up. 

You’ll also become a member of our “Save Wild Orangutan” team as a monthly donor, and receive our exclusive updates from the field and blog posts for our members which I think you will enjoy.

Thanks for your consideration of this opportunity!

The Wild Ride
“The Wild Ride” is one of the my favorite orangutan images I have made in Gunung Palung for several reasons.  It tells the story of a mother orangutan traveling through the primary rainforest, which you can tell because of the massive size of the tree trunk in the left side fo the frame.  It shows how she is using large vines, or lianas, as the bridges through this complex canopy of trees, and finally, it shows how a very young infant has to be able to hold on tight to mom’s skin and fur all by herself because mom needs all her hands and feet for locomotion.  It is hard to explain how much effort was needed to capture an image like this.  It involves following the orangutans through the forest all day with the research team carrying camera gear, and looking for gaps through the foliage.  The best views are from hills I’ve scrambled up in steep terrain to be able to get shots that give you the feeling of being in the canopy with the orangutans (like in this shot) and not just looking up from the ground.  All the sweat is worth it though, when a great moment like this presents itself, and I’m able to capture it to share with all of you.