A Calgary-based wildlife photographer captured a “once in a lifetime” image of a rare animal when shooting in the Canadian wilderness on April 15 on the outskirts of the city.
“I had no idea what it was until it broke out into the open and I got a couple shots of it,” Gordon Cooke told CBC News. He realized he had been photographing a wild wolverine.
“There was no time to recheck the camera settings, so I was praying the whole time that the settings were good and the pictures would come out,” he said to McClatchy News.
The images show the carnivorous mammal perched on a log in the wetlands of southern Calgary.
With 11 years of experience under his belt, Cooke said this was the peak for any wildlife photographer.
“This ranks the ultimate,” he said. “Not just for me, this is basically the ultimate for most wildlife photographers.”
According to the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada, wolverines, Latin for “glutton”, were once common in southern Canada, however over harvesting resulted in the decline in its population.
Wolverines are ferocious and solitary animals capable of killing prey many times larger than itself.
“It’s a superhero of the wilderness,” Chris Fisher, an Albertan naturalist, said Monday on the Calgary Eyeopener. “Quite frankly, you just don’t see them anywhere, never mind a major metropolitan city like Calgary.”
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