Readers’ wildlife photos

Please send in your photos, as the tank is inexorably getting lower.

Today’s photos come from reader Tony Eales in Queensland, who calls them “A real random assortment of photos.” His IDs and captions are indented.

The first is a male Australian Bustard (Ardeotis australis) in full mating display mode. Tail up against its back, wings drooped, neck pouch inflated and long neck feathers fanned out. They strut around like this making a booming call to attract females in the area. This is one of my older photos from 2008, and I’ve never witnessed the display before or since.

Next is one of my favourite photos, a Striated Heron (Butorides striata macrorhynchus) who looks like he was told that getting into a swimming pool would make him happy but has found that it is not as much fun as everyone said it would be and he still can’t stop thinking about his problems.

Here’s a species I don’t often photograph: some juvenile Homo sapiens sapiens. I was asked to do photography for the Butchalla Peoples’ Land and Sea native title determination, and I really love this shot of some young girls excitedly practicing before the big traditional dance to celebrate the ruling. In Australia, Aboriginal groups can have their existing title to the land recognised by the Federal Court of Australia. Such cases take many grueling years through the lengthy and fraught legal process, and a successful ruling is a cause for a great celebration.

And next is Homo sapiens uxorem. My wife when we went on our desert trip in the winter of 2016 to find that the desert was hidden by fields of wildflowers following once-in-several-decades rain.

My favourite cockatoo, the very colonially named Major Mitchell’s Cockatoo (Lophochroa leadbeateri leadbeaterii). It is in a monotypic genus with two sub-species; they live only in the arid regions of the outback but are one of the more beautiful birds to photograph. I had been doing several trips into the right area without seeing any until this one landed high in a dead tree in front of me.

I found this clutch of newly hatched net casting spiders in the rainforest near my city. I was very puzzled by them, as I only knew of the Ogre-faced Net-casting Spiders (Deinopis subrufa and related) that generally live in open eucalypt forest and have webs low to the ground. There were up in palm leaves in a rainforest which made no sense to me, but the way they hold their legs in that cross pattern was unmistakable for any other spider. I have since found and photographed a leaf dwelling rainforest specialist net caster, Menneus nemesio, so I can only presume these must be the babies.

I’d still like to get a photo of the Australian Two-spined Spider (Poecilopachys australasia), in which the white markings aren’t overexposed, but I love this picture where it is nestled in a grass seed-head. They are  pretty spiders that are rarely seen as they hide during the day and set their orb-webs at night. This one is a mature female; younger ones have their abdomen covered in long bristly hairs which disappear as they age.

The last two I just like the shots, an unidentified Theridiid spider catching a damselfly and an unidentified caterpillar munching a fig leaf.