If this Steller’s jay looks like it’s cold, that’s because it is. Photographer Craig Barfoot, of Polson, shot the chilled corvid last winter in a forested area northwest of town where he’d paused from putting up firewood at a friend’s house. “That was during that cold snap last January, when it got down to 30 below,” he says. “The woods had fresh snow, and this jay had been feeding at a bird feeder when I saw him resting in a larch. Usually, they get spooked, but it was so cold that morning he was in something akin to a fluffed-up torpor and just sat there.”

Barfoot ran to his pickup and grabbed his camera, hoping the jay would stay put. “He stayed still while I kept my distance and used a long lens so as not to disturb him,” he says. Disturbing a bird or any wildlife in bitter cold can cause them to expend precious energy, Barfoot explains. “Another challenge was getting a clear shot through the branches of the larch. And I had poor light, so I had to use a high ISO in combination with a relatively fast shutter speed, which helped capture all that feather and snow detail.”

Barfoot grew up in the Black Hills where his dad was a logger. He earned his graduate degree in fish and wildlife management at Montana State University, did his graduate work surveying fish in southeastern Montana prairie streams, near Ekalaka, not far from his childhood homeland, and has worked as a fisheries biologist for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes since 2000. “I picked up photography years ago and have messed around with it ever since, and it’s become a real passion,” he says. “I mostly take unusual photos of unusual animals like frogs, toads, and birds—like this Steller’s jay—that many people have never heard of.”

—Tom Dickson, editor