The readers’ wildlife tank is running low again; I don’t have my usual comfortable backlog. Send in good photos, please.
From reader John Harshman:
Wait, I have more from my trip to Australia.
A laughing kookaburra (Dacelo novaehollandiae). He was sitting on a fence, periodically descending to the ground to dig earthworms. You can see the dirt on his beak.
A white-bellied sea eagle (Haliaeetus leucogaster), very similar to its North American congener.
A male magpie goose (Anseranas semipalmata). You can tell he’s male because of the big lump on top of his head. Magpie geese are famous for forming stable threesomes, one male and two females.
A Papuan frogmouth (Podargus papuensis). This is as close as I get to a nightjar photo.
A male Cairns birdwing butterfly (Ornithoptera euphorion), taken at the Australian Butterfly Sanctuary in Kuranda, Queensland. [JAC: This is Australia’s largest endemic butterfly.]
I believe this is a Lumholtz’s tree kangaroo (Dendrolagus lumholtzi) taking a nap in a tree; best picture I could get.
Very interesting. One of my bucket list items is to visit Australia. I would be sooo all over the butterfly sanctuary.
Great photos! Love the magpie goose ( will resist making a cheeky comment about the male’s lumpy head🐸)
Kookaburras are so cute 🙂
I found the frogmouth! And usually I’m no good at these “spot the nightjar games”…
Me too, but I still struggled to figure out how it’s beak fitted on to its face! 🙁
Oh, I am so going to use this the next time I see some smarmy, self-righteous christian sporting a “GMFL” (“Geese mate for life”) pin. For those of you who haven’t seen it, it’s a way of putting down all those who don’t have a traditional marriage (and ignores the fact that the divorce rate among christians is no lower than among the general population, at least so far as I know).
What a fascinating assortment, John!
I’d so love to see a frogmouth! Well, any of your creatures, of course; but especially the frogmouth!
Young buck enjoying my salt lick Moscow in western Tennessee in August. This is in my back horse pasture.
Cheers, Mark
“When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minuteâand it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.” Albert Einstein