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I have not seen many Sea Lion tongues in my time. This is one of the few. I believe this is actually a Stellar Sea Lion, one of two species we have here in California. I wish this image showed more of the tongue, but when you are paddling a kayak and the Sea Lion is bigger than your kayak and has rather long looking teeth (you can see his teeth on the post The Sea Lion Snarls… I pretty much let him do whatever he wants instead of trying to pose him.

When I took these photographs from my kayak I must admit I was thrilled and nervous at the same time. I didn’t think the Sea Lion would do anything to me, but as I said, he was much bigger, even when you put me and my kayak together. I did not approach him, he came over to inspect me and check me out (although I definitely did my share of checking out also.) This is decidedly the closest I’ve ever been to a wild Sea Lion, and it felt interesting indeed to be the object of his scrutiny.

I captured these photographs hand held, as tripods are rather impractical in a kayak. Shutter speed was high- 1/1250th so that I could freeze any water droplets (which I did in some other images of this big guy), and to prevent camera shake in my images. Aperture was set to f/8 to give at least a little depth of field. The lens was a 300mm with a 1.4x converter for a total of 420mm

There are times when Sea Lions don’t make me nervous in the least, like when I came across the languid Sea Lion.

For more animal tongues, you can have a look at these animals-

River Otter tongue
Gull’s tongue while swallowing a whole starfish
Tule Elk tongue
White-tailed Kite tongue (it’s a type of bird/hawk/raptor
Song Sparrow tongue while singing