Wild Mothers

A mother  is a woman who has raised a child, given birth to a child, and/or supplied the ovum that united with a sperm which grew into a child.

A newly hatched red-necked grebe relaxes, safe under mom's wing. It's been a long day and there's still so much to see.

For a [female] cheetah the real danger is not losing a kill but losing her cubs. Female cheetahs deal with the threat by constantly moving, preferably before their rivals even know they're around. They coexist as phantom species, slipping into temporary vacancies between prides of lions and packs of hyenas."

A young elephant nuzzles its mother during a visit to the drought-depleted Zambezi riverbed.

A Mexican grey wolf snuggles with two pups at the Sedgwick County Zoo. At one time, grey wolves were among the most widely distributed mammals on Earth. 

"A fistful of mother's skin and hair keeps one-year-old Bekti aloft as she rides on Beth, who is hurtling herself through the forest. It will likely be almost seven years before Bekti will have a younger sibling, one of the intriguing aspects of orang utans that has lured me [anthropologist Cheryl Knot] to Borneo to study their reproductive cycles and social patterns."
 

South Georgia Island has king penguins, and, in this location, there is a colony of a quarter million of the wonderful, colourful animals. Here a mother king penguin guided her chick, which still sports its somewhat comical-looking baby feathers.



While hiking in the Galapagos among a colony of seals, we came upon this mother and pup sharing what appears to be a "tender moment."