Toward the end of June, I got the opportunity to go to Apalachicola, Florida for a New York Times assignment to photograph Mobile Manatees’s Allen Aven and Nicole Taylor trying to locate and monitor a manatee named Bama. They were looking for signs that she had been affected by the approaching oil slick.
It was a long day — most of it spent in the car headed there and back — but it was so cool to get a chance to see their research being done first-hand, and to briefly, and from a distance, get a chance to meet Bama in person.
If you didn’t see the story, check it out. I saw that writer John Leland has also written an update to the earlier story a couple of weeks ago. It seems Bama has slipped her tracking device, which I’m sure will make the work of monitoring her even more of a challenge.
