The nocturnal ocelot

the dense vegetation. Jaguars make it easy for us because they hunt along rivers where they expose themselves in the open where we have clear shots of them. Ocelots, on the other hand, are much more difficult to capture. The only way to reliably take pictures of them is to bait these beautiful jungle cats with food. So, in the Pantanal we attracted this ocelot to a location where the members of my photo tour group were in a wide, expansive blind. Ocelots are nocturnal; this one came to our setup just before dark. It is illuminated by muted artificial lights so no flash was necessary. I used a Canon 100-500mm zoom set to 167mm for this composition, and the settings were 1/125, f/5.0, and 2500 ISO.