Category: photography

Readers’ wildlife photos

July 31, 2023 • 8:15 am

Here’s the second part of a batch of photos sent by Texas reader Rik Gern (part 1 is here). The introduction was this:

n mid-March I visited a friend on a ranch in Luling, Texas, a small town about 50 miles south of Austin and 60 miles east of San Antonio. Originally a railroad town, and once known as “the toughest town in Texas”, Luling is now a minor oil town. [JAC: It’s also the home of the City Market, one of the finest BBQ joints in Texas.]

The landscape is typical of much of central Texas; it can look monotonous on the surface, but it’s full of interesting life when you look up close. The woods, which the locals refer to as scrub brush, consists largely of Spanish Oak, Mesquite, and Elm:

You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them; Rik’s text is indented.

This looks like some kind of floating spiked orb, but it is an overhead view of a Texas thistle (Cirsium texanum).

Here is a view of the flower in bloom. If this was all there was to it and it wasn’t covered in spikes, you’d want them as ground cover all over the place!

Here are several of the plants in different stages of blooming. Still beautiful, but a little more menacing.

Bitterweed (Helenium amarum) may have been the most common flower in this field. It’s a member of the daisy family and also goes by the names of yellow sneezeweed and bitter sneezeweed. I guess I got lucky because they didn’t make me sneeze!

This pink evening primrose (Oenothera speciosa) makes for an interesting optical illusion; the light is coming from the upper right and of course the petals form a concave shape, but if you imagine the light source coming from the lower left, all of a sudden it appears to be billowing outward in a convex fashion. These are often referred to as buttercups, but are not part of that family.

As I was photographing this Winecup (Callirhoe involucrata) I noticed some movement and was surprised to get photobombed by a little spider. I didn’t realize spiders could be pollinators.

You’d think this flower would be easy to identify, but iNaturalist’s Seek app couldn’t identify it, and a web search for “yellow Texas wildflowers” didn’t help either. It’s mighty pretty though, and this picture is also photobombed, this time by two tiny critters with long antennae.

This is called a pinwheel or Indian blanket (Gaillardia pulchella) and has been photobombed by the same type of critter that found its way into the previous picture.

The sun sets on Luling; a beautiful end to a beautiful day!

To give you an idea of the richness of the landscape, all of these pictures, minus the sunset were taken within an approximately fifteen foot radius of one another. One other life form that played a major role (the villain, as it were) in these pictures was the pesky chigger (genus Eutrombicula). City boy that I am, I waded deep into the fields and got down on my hands and knees to take pictures, entranced by the beauty of the plants and neglectful of the precautions I should have taken against these little pests. Not only did I fail to tuck my pants into my boots, but I neglected to shower at the end of the day, so when I returned to my home in Austin I had bright red itchy dots all around the area covered by my sox and grundies. That was about ten weeks ago and I still have marks on my ankles. I won’t make that mistake again, but it was still worth it to see so many pretty sights!

Readers’ wildlife photos

July 30, 2023 • 8:15 am

It’s Sunday, and we have a themed bird post by John Avise, this time on the runner-up to the “Most photogenic bird” competition. John’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them,

Runner-up to Most Photogenic Songbird? 

Last week I showcased the Northern Mockingbird as the most photogenic North American songbird, in my experience.  This week showcases my personal runner-up for this honor: the White-crowned Sparrow (Zonotrichia leucophrys).  This species is attractive, relatively tame and very common here in Southern California during the winter months.

Adult:

Adult frontal:

Adult back view:

Adult portrait:

Another adult portrait:

Adult on flower:

Adult head portrait:

Adult pair:

Juvenile:

Juvenile (note the tan median head stripe):

Juvenile back view:

12) parting shot for the species:

Readers’ wildlife photos

July 29, 2023 • 8:15 am

Today we have photos of New Zealand by Kiwi reader Keith Cook. Keith’s notes and captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

First is a home shot (Auckland) to get started and the rest are from a winter holiday (South. Is) New Zealand.

Sunrise. this is a shot of the sun rising at its most southern point (taken from home) or is that the southern hemisphere’s most northern point by the tilt of Earth? Anyway, this is the height of summer for us.

Misty river. This was taken like the following from the TranzAlpine heading towards Greymouth from Christchurch. A rail trip from the east to the west coast through the Southern Alps and we chose to come back on the same day. Being a lover of railways I enjoyed every moment of it. I took this shot from an open observation carriage. This shot is the north facing side of the carriage, the rail line and Wiamakariki river are flanked by a gorge.

South Island Bush. Taken facing south after dropping down to sea level from Arthur’s Pass I believe the forest here to be, Dept. of Conservation (DOC): “Dacrycarpus dacrydioides, commonly known as kahikatea and white pine, is a coniferous tree endemic to New Zealand. A podocarp, it is New Zealand’s tallest tree, gaining heights of 60 m over a life span of 600 years.” I wouldn’t be surprised if Kauri, Agathis australis were in the shot but I can’t tell for sure.

Hillside Moon, Snow covered hills, Hillside snow cap. These are taken from the highway leading up to the Lindis Pass. A lovely scenic tour through central Otago heading north.

A restored Chinese miners hut. DOC: “In 1866 fewer than 200 Chinese miners lived in Otago, but Census figures for 1874 show that there were 3564 Chinese in Otago, and most were working on the goldfields. Often victims of harassment and discrimination, they lived on the fringes of European settlements in isolated gullies close to their mining claims.”

Arrowtown, Otago a quaint little town and tourist spot.It wasn’t all about the scenery but I wouldn’t have minded either way, the South Island was empty of all international tourist and to some extent, locals. No buses, no campervans, minimal traffic. We were the tourist! It is winter as you can see and we had just come out of 4 weeks of Covid 19 lock down. My wife and I were supposed to be in the UK visiting our daughter but this was a pretty good alternative…

Arotaki Mt Cook. Our highest peak, and it was just a beautiful day and to finally see this mountain up close and ‘live’ was a real treat.

Hillside Moon, Snow covered hills, Hillside snow cap. These are taken from the highway leading up to the Lindis Pass. A lovely scenic tour through central Otago heading north.

JAC: Here are two maps of the South Island; I’ve noted spots mentioned. “Otago” is a region of the South Island, extending from Queenstown to Dunedin:

Otago is the area encompassed by the red dashes:

Readers’ wildlife photos

July 28, 2023 • 8:15 am

Posting may be light today as it’s a busy day: I have to feed the dorm ducks, giving them extra water because it’s going to be hot (93° F, 34° C), and then we have to meet with Facilities this afternoon to see what the fate of Botany Pond is.  I’m worried as they mentioned “duck deterrents” during the mating season. No baby ducks? Unthinkable!  Besides, since the pond will be full of water there is no way in hell to keep ducks away from it.

Today sees the return of regular Mark Sturtevant, insect and arthropod photographer extraodinaire.  His captions are indented and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Here are more pictures that are mainly from the previous summer. The first two pictures are nymphs of a predatory Hemipteran known as the Masked Hunter (Reduvius personatus). As nymphs, they decorate themselves with dirt or sand for concealment. The third picture shows an adult Masked Hunter. Although the nymphs are normally very difficult to find, both the nymph and the adult were found at my porch light at night. Most members of this family (Reduviidae, or assassin bugs) are slow and plodding, but Masked Hunters are surprisingly quick on their feet.

A “fen” is a special kind of wetland that is a bit different from what one might call a bog or a marsh. I have learned that defining these things is a delicate matter, but as I understand it a fen is sustained by water that percolates up from limestone, resulting in an alkaline pH. Fens are characterized by an array of specific and interesting plants (and insects, as we shall see). There is a park about 15 minutes from my house called Seven Lakes State Park, and it has several fens. One of them can only be accessed by a Secret Path through the woods, and I’ve never seen a trace of anyone else there so it is now “Sturtevant’s Fen”.

Once out of the woods, the higher ground surrounding Sturtevant’s Fen is sprinkled with a lovely orchid called the Grass Pink Orchid, Calopogon tuberosus, as shown in the next picture. This orchid is famously described as the “upside down orchid”, but that is all part of a great deception. Orchid flower anatomy is a bit different from other flowers, and I hope I get this right (feel free of course to correct me, someone). In orchids, the sepals and petals tend to look like petals, and male and female reproductive organs are fused into a single structure called the column that can be seen in this orchid as the curved structure at the bottom. But what about those bright yellow thingies on the top-most sepal that look like male anthers? They are the deception part of the story, and also why this is the upside- down orchid. What appears to be a flashy set of anthers that promise a rich pollen reward are actually lures, aimed at tricking bees. When a bee visits this flower, it will likely go after the false anthers, and this causes the sepal they are on to suddenly hinge down and whack the bee against the column. This results in sticky and inaccessible pollen sacs attaching to the back of the bee. The bee flies off, and if it visits another of these orchids it will likely make the same mistake by going after the false anthers (bees are not smart). It will get whacked again, and this results in the pollen sacs being transferred. Darwin would have loved this orchid!

Out on the fen proper, the ground becomes firm sand that is always under about a quarter inch of water. Your shoes will get wet. And among the dense stands of coarse sedge grasses are three different species of carnivorous plants! Most obvious among them are the numerous Pitcher Plants,  Sarracenia purpurea, which are shown in the next two pictures. Early in the season, these have tall flower stalks with weird flowers. A feature of carnivorous plants is that they do not want to eat their pollinators, so they keep their flowers well away from their insect traps. I wonder if the weird shape of the flowers themselves are also designed to keep their pollinators from falling to their doom. Of course, the watery trap in each pitcher plant holds syrupy water with digestive juices and often lots of dissolved insects. Once I found a live maggot living inside one that was evidently there to feed on trapped insects.

Crowding around the bases of the pitcher plants are Sundews, another insect-eating plant shown in the next picture. They of course trap and digest insects with sticky hairs on their leaves. The Sundew here I think is Drosera rotundiflora. They too try to not kill their pollinators with flowers on tall stalks, but I have yet to see those.

How those two carnivorous plants trap prey is pretty obvious and well known. The third carnivorous plant is more subtle about it. Dotting the fen landscape are much scarcer but very distinct flowers, one of which is shown in the next picture. These belong to the horned bladderwort (Utricularia cornuta). Bladderworts are more aquatic, and they have tiny specialized vessels among their roots that trap and digest small aquatic prey.

But for me, the real attraction of my private fen is a very special little dragonfly. These are Elfin Skimmers (Nannothemis bella), and they are by far the smallest dragonfly in the U.S. The world’s smallest dragonfly is a close relative found in China, and it is not much smaller! Elfin Skimmers abound in Sturtevant’s Fen, which is as it should be. First, here is a female. These are suspected to be wasp mimics. Next is a male.

Although those tiny dragons were perched on grass blades, it may still be hard to convey how incredibly tiny these are for a dragonfly. So just for this post, I made a special trip back to Sturtevant’s fen with a butterfly net and very carefully captured the young female shown in the last picture. Look at your index finger. The body of that little dragon will hardly stretch across the width of your finger!

Readers’ wildlife photos

July 27, 2023 • 8:15 am

I have many promises from readers to send photos in, but I haven’t called in the promissory notes. Do send me any good wildlife photos you have.

Today we have part 4 of Tony Eales’s recent safari to Botswana (part 1 is here, part 2 is here, and part 3 is here). To me this is the culmination: Victoria Falls!

Tony’s narrative is indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Safari Part IV: Chobe and Victoria Falls

Chobe is an amazing national park famous for its large population of elephants and having lions that specialise in hunting elephants:

Our best viewings of wildlife were along the Chobe River, the south side of which is in Botswana and the opposite shore, Namibia. Young giraffes (Giraffa camelopardalis ssp. giraffa) sparring on the banks of the Chobe River.

And young impala (Aepyceros melampus) also sparring:

From the high banks we could watch giant herds of buffalo:

The riverbank also had a large troop of chacma baboons (Papio ursinus ssp. griseipes) allowing close up views of family like and squabbles.

And by the riverside the sunsets were amazing as the large mammals started to get active again:

On the Zimbabwe border we bid farewell to our guides and safari truck and after processing we got into a minibus and went to the tourist township of Victoria Falls. Several of the group decided to hire a taxi together and visit the falls that afternoon. The entrance had long lines and where the taxi dropped us hawkers came and asked us if we wanted to hire a raincoat for 3USD. Most were thinking “How wet can it really be?” but I thought that it was probably a good idea and in the end we all hired raincoats. The entrance looked cheesy with faux rocks and vines rendered in concrete giving it a bit of a discount Flintstones look, and entry for foreigners was an eyewatering 50USD each. We got in and went through the kiosk and gift store, following the rising sound of the falls and the ever-present sound of helicopters.

All I can say is that $50 seems cheap now, the first glimpses of the falls were jaw-dropping. we looked out on massive thundering falls with unmeasurable amounts of water plummeting into invisible depths, obscured as the bottom was by the clouds of spray. Above it all a great rainbow.

Picking up our jaws from the floor we soon realised that this represented perhaps a tenth of the falls and only the first of some 20 odd viewing spots along about a kilometre and a half of cliff-face that looked across directly at the face of the falls.

We were all giggling and babbling, almost running from one viewing spot to the next, through a rainforest created entirely by the spray of the falls:

Each viewing spot got progressively more of the spray until the last spot was basically like a tropical downpour:

And that was the trip.  We saw so much wildlife, experienced a world very different from the one I grew up with or that I see represented anywhere on tv or in the media and marvelled at landscapes at once familiar but also alien.

I’ve travelled a lot of the world and you could say that about anywhere, the world is a wonderful and awe-inspiring place but even so, there’s something extra special about sub-Saharan Africa that’s not like anything I’ve seen before. What a place!

Readers’ wildlife photos

July 26, 2023 • 8:15 am

Don’t forget to send in any good wildlife photos you have lying about!

Today’s plant photos are from reader Dan Fromm. His captions are indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them:

Our Texas rain lilies.

In the early ‘oughts my wife and I visited a friend in Austin, TX, a native Texan and a retired ichthyologist,  who took us to visit Pedernales Falls State Park where Pat, who is our family’s gardener, dug up a few bulbs of a rain lily.  Jim told us that the plant was Cooperia drummondi.

www.itis.gov, my preferred reference for taxonomy, says that C. drummondi Herb. is an invalid synonym of Zephyranthes chlorosolen (Herb.) D. Dietr. and that Z. drummondii D. Don. is also valid.  I’m not as clear as I’d like to be about how to tell the two apart but believe with no good justification that ours are Z. drummondii.

We brought Pat’s wild rain lilies back to New Jersey.  She potted them, set them out on the patio and hoped for the best.  The plants bloomed, the flowers were pollinated by our local bees and we had seeds.  Some fell into their parents’ pot; Pat selected others and put them on top of the soil in new pots and in the garden.

Since our winters are more severe than Texas Hill Country winters, Pat brings her potted rain lilies in for the winter.  They usually go out in mid-spring.  She doesn’t water them at all while they’re indoors.  After they’re outside and watered they bloom.  We have more plants than we started with, not a surprise.

Pat has continued this cycle for more than twenty years.  2023 started slowly for our rain lilies, who stayed indoors until June 27th.  We had rain that day, and on the morning of 29th we had three trays of lovely white blossoms.  The trays bulge because the plants’ bulbs have grown.  The largest are fist sized.

In the morning of the 30th the white blooms had turned pink.  By the end of the day the blossoms had begun to collapse.

On the morning a July 1st we had a few new white flowers.  The older ones had pretty much shed their petals.  Later that day developing seed pods began to appear and the pedicels started to fall off.

On July 4th the pods were larger but some pedicels remained.

On July 8th the pods were well developed but not ready to dehisce.

On July 14th the pods were open and ready to shed seeds.  They might have begun to open a day or two earlier but I wasn’t up to visiting them then.  Gastroenteritis, not recommended.  After I photographed them Pat harvested the seed pods and spread some seeds on fresh soil in a new tray.

July 18:

Finally, by July 23d the seeds had germinated and the sprouts were well on the way.

Readers’ wildlife photos

July 25, 2023 • 8:15 am

Inspired by the contributions of Paul Edelman and John Avise, ecologist Susan Harrison nominates her most photogenic bird, which isn’t a songbird but I’ll allow it. Her defense is indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Feel free, if you have good bird pictures, to join the competition.

Western Screech-Owls

They’re not technically songbirds, but they are tiny (5 ounces), eat a lot of insects, live in suburbia, and sing beautifully.   I nominate Western Screech-Owls (Megascops kennicottii) for Most Photogenic Songbird in the “Slightly Demonic-Looking” category.

These four Screech-Owls reside in Ashland, Oregon backyards where the homeowners have put out nest boxes.   The first two, in adjacent redwood trees, are a father and one of his youngsters.  The second two, sitting under the eaves, are a mated pair.

Readers’ wildlife photos

July 24, 2023 • 8:15 am

In yesterday’s photo series, John Avise showed us a lot of swell pictures of what he considers North America’s most photogenic songbird, the Northern Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos). Today Paul Edelman has a different choice. Paul’s caption is indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

I nominate the Yellow Warbler [Setophaga petechia].  For a warbler it is remarkably gregarious and just adorable.  The photos speak for themselves.

Readers’ wildlife photos

July 23, 2023 • 8:15 am

It’s Sunday, and that means bird photos by John Avise. Today John highlights what he sees as America’s most photogenic songbird. His captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them:

Most Photogenic Songbird? 

Many songbird species (in the order Passeriformes) are notoriously difficult to photograph because they are flighty, timid, and/or uncommon.  However, a few North American songbirds are more photogenic because they are somewhat calmer, more conspicuous, and/or very common, thereby giving many photographic opportunities (even if they may not always be the most strikingly beautiful of species).  So, in my personal experience, what is the “most photogenic songbird”?  And my answer is…. : the Northern Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos).  This week’s post shows several poses of this conspicuous and widely distributed North American species.  And, as a bonus, this species is quite attractive and has a beautiful song. [JAC: you can hear some songs here.]

Perhaps next week I’ll show my runner-up species for most photogenic songbird.

Posing:

Frontal view:

Note the yellow iris:

Showing its cocky attitude:

Posing in flowers:

Another pose:

Taking off:

Flying:

Pair showing off:

Singing:

Fledgling showing off his white wing patches:

Fledgling headshot:

Teenager:

JAC: There are a lot of bird photographers out there. What’s your most photogenic songbird?

Readers’ wildlife photos

July 21, 2023 • 8:15 am

Today we have BOBCAT photos from ecologist Susan Harrison. Susan’s captions are indented and you can enlarge the bobcats by clicking on them.

One summer morning in the life of a Bobcat (Lynx rufus) near Williams, Oregon

Any rodents in there?

How about in here?

Oh – is that a human up ahead?)

It’s not moving…

Rodents??

The human is looking at me with a strange shiny eye.

It seems harmless, but you never know. . . .

Better remind it whose territory this is.

Mind your business, human, and I’ll do the same.

Slooowly does it…..

(Studied indifference)

‘Bye, human.  Now where was I?  Rodents!