Eleven days in the bitter cold of a remote slice of Manitoba, Canada, is enough to frustrate just about anyone. But at this moment in February 2024, Trey Mahoney is uniquely perturbed. He has waited a year since booking his trip, took three flights and an hour-long train ride to a repurposed military outpost with no running water or cell service, and endured countless hours in negative-30-degree temperatures to photograph polar bear cubs as they emerge from their winter den for the first time. Now it’s time to go home, and he doesn’t have a single worthwhile image.
“We had exactly one 120-minute session with the mom and two cubs,” he says. “The light was lousy, and the cubs were kind of buried in the snow. We just couldn’t get anything. It was demoralizing because I knew I wasn’t getting back up there anytime soon.”
Mahoney lives in North Palm Beach and works as the managing director at UBS Focus Wealth Management, the company his late father, Jim Mahoney, founded. He was born in South Florida but raised in the Carolinas; he moved here in 2012 to start his career. Work is demanding and home life is busy. Mahoney and his wife, Lindsay, have a 2-year-old son named James and a newborn daughter named Elle, who arrived in June.
Even so, Mahoney isn’t one to spend his downtime lounging poolside. Rather, he rushes to the far corners of the globe for the chance to glimpse—and photograph—some of Earth’s rarest species. Like his line of work, it’s something he picked up from his father, though as a teenager, he wasn’t quite sold.
In 2005, at age 17, Mahoney traveled to Africa with his dad. One of the goals of the trip was to spot leopards—a plentiful but elusive cat that’s notoriously hard to capture on camera. Luckily for father and son, there was one in repose close to where they were waiting.
“My dad named all the pieces,” Mahoney recalls. “[The cat] didn’t have any bare spots in his fur. He had a full belly, so we knew he wouldn’t go anywhere anytime soon. The tree wasn’t dead, but it also wasn’t so lush that you couldn’t see the cat.”
The only problem: the cat was in silhouette. So, they waited—for 10 hours—for the sun to move.
“As a teenager, I can tell you that I was bored out of my mind sitting at the tree all day,” says Mahoney. He changed his mind once he saw the framed print and thought, “This is cool. This is something I could get behind.”
With hand-me-down equipment and a thirst for adventure, Mahoney set off to earn his own photographic trophies. A favorite destination is Alaska. At least six times he’s taken a float plane to remote parts of the state’s peninsula, slept on a boat for a week, and used a skiff to search inland for brown bears clamming in tidal flats—getting close enough for great shots while maintaining a safe and respectful distance.
Over the years, he’s added drone and underwater photography to his repertoire and improved other skills to get photos of the animals that intrigue him. He’s cage dived off Mexico’s Guadalupe Island in pursuit of great white sharks and free dived with orcas feeding off the coast of Norway. In February, he plans to free dive with humpback whales in Japan.
“Hobbies are no shortage for me,” he jokes.
Mahoney’s bucket list of destinations is ever-growing, and he plans expeditions carefully. Lindsay is always invited and has joined him on two—though that’s trickier now with a young family. Mahoney hopes one day to pass the passion on to his children, just as his father did with him. For now, he prints and frames his images to display at home and in his office, where he enjoys sharing the stories behind them with friends and clients. He also donates framed prints for charity auctions.
As for the polar bears, “I started begging and pleading to stay longer—an extra two, three, four days,” Mahoney says. The operators conceded two days and accommodations in the crew’s quarters. “The planets aligned on my last day.”
Sixty yards away, on a snowy hill against a clear sky, a healthy mama bear appeared with her two happy cubs. The light was good, and nothing was obstructing the view. “We’d been out there for five-and-a-half hours, and we got to shoot for about 20 minutes,” Mahoney explains. In two-and-a-half seconds of that time, a cub climbed on top of the mother. Eventually, both cubs looked directly at the camera.
What did he think at that precise moment?
He laughs. “Don’t forget to take the picture.”
Trey Mahoney took this photo near the peak of an 11-year solar cycle and captured a vibrant set of colors.
“Puffins will leave their nesting grounds to fly up to 50 miles to fish for sandeel larva,” Mahoney explains. “They will then carry an average of 10 fish back to the nest to feed their young, [known as] pufflings.”
“In the five-and-a-half hours we watched this family in temperatures approaching negative 30 degrees, I went through nine batteries and two camera bodies.”
“Guadalupe is known as one of the best places in the world to cage dive with great whites due to the abundance of sharks during the fall and the crystal-clear water. Visibility can exceed 100 feet.”
“This male, in his prime, was around 500 pounds and one of the leaders of his pride.”
“African elephants are the largest land mammals in the world, weighing up to 14,000 pounds. They also have the longest gestation cycle at
22 months.”
“Giraffes are unique in that they have the highest blood pressure of any animal and their spots are like fingerprints—unique to each animal. This photo is of a mother and her relatively new calf. You can still see the umbilical cord on the calf.”
“Brown bear diets consist largely of grasses, flowers, and berries. However, this mother and cub were in Hallo Bay, [which has a] plentiful supply of clams and the incoming salmon run would begin in a few short weeks.”
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