Marty’s photo of the day #4451: When Deb and I traveled to Australia, one of our goals was to see a platypus. We had heard they were difficult to find, but we got lucky and saw multiple platypuses over multiple days. Photographing them was a different matter, however. They lived in a fairly wide section of the Broken River, and the water was dark. They’d surface without any warning of when or where they would do so, and then quickly dive back under the water. On that trip, my main camera used film, so I didn’t know that I’d taken multiple rolls of blurry platypus photos until I had the film developed back in the United States. Today’s picture is one of the few where you can actually tell it’s a platypus in the river.
But I can’t complain. I dedicate today’s photo to Phillip Spencer, a social media friend of mine who lives in Australia, yet he has never seen a platypus in the wild.