Readers’ wildlife photographs

August 28, 2016 • 7:30 am

Reader Michael Glenister sent some wildlife vacation snaps. His captions are indented:

I just got back from a 2 week road trip from Vancouver to Drumheller with my kids.  So here are a few photos of for your perusal:
From Manning Park: ground squirrels, the second being very laid back:
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A mule deer [Odocoileus hemionus]:
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Moving on to the Kelowna Kangaroo Farm, a large lichen [JAC: looks like a coral fugus to me; can readers ID?]:
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Feeding the capybara [Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris]:
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The sugar glider [Petaurus breviceps] decided to climb into my camera case:
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Albino wallaby with joey [reader ID?]:
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11 thoughts on “Readers’ wildlife photographs”

  2. Sugar Glider in your camera case? I thought that was your zoom lens.

    (sorry, dad jokes may need trigger warnings!)

    Cute pics. I’ve always been rather fond of the capybara but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in person

  3. Michael, hope the kids enjoyed the Royal Tyrrell in Drumheller. Well worth the drive. Thought of investigating burgess shale on the way back, but that would take the day. Next time.

  4. T^hose bad lands are bad! I remember a trip there when I trod through the mud. That is some mud and I think my shoes must have weighed ten pounds apiece.

    The Tyrrell museum is great and would freak out Ken Ham.

  5. The kids thought the road trip was “awesome”, and really enjoyed their simulated dinosaur dig at the Royal Tyrell Museum. We also stopped at Lake Louise, but the weather was off, so no Burgess Shale.

    On a related note (and you’ll guess the punchline), when I was in university we collected samples at Manning Park for a lichen study. A few weeks or months later I was shaving and noticed a white hair on my chin that wasn’t cut well by my electric razor. It continued to challenge my razor over the next while, until eventually I took a pair of scissors and cut it. It started to regrow, and later when it was at the scissor stage, I instead grabbed it to give it a pull. To my surprise, it was soft and slightly squishy, and definitely not a hair at all. I gave it a pull and it easily popped out. I realized a spore from a lichen in the lab had landed in one of my pores, and had started to grow out of my chin. I lost it though, otherwise I would be curious to find out which species it was.

      1. I have to wonder how many people have had a lichen grow on them. I’d be very surprised if I was the only one, but I imagine it is limited to people who are exposed to a lot of lichen spores (eg. labs).

    3. Just a second.
      “Lichen spore” ??
      Aren’t lichens a symbiotic combination of an alga and a fungus (with recent reports adding a yeast into the mix too). So it would need to transmit a fungal spore, an algal (what’s the word?) thallus (?) and some support structure?

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