Readers’ wildlife photos

January 11, 2024 • 8:15 am

Today we have an assortment of photos (plants, one insect, and one reptile) from Rik Gern of Austin, Texas. Rik’s notes are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

This is an odds and ends collection of photos that I would not have submitted were it not for the fact that your supply of reader’s photos is running so low. I’d call this batch “Reader’s Mildlife Photos” since they represent species easily observable on a walk around my Austin, TX neighborhood and nearby.

The first two pictures come from my back yard. The Texas Spiny Lizard (Sceloporis olivaceus) made an appearance while I was turning the compost pile and adding the semi weekly supply of kitchen scraps. Although hard to spot at first, it was easy to photograph since it stood incredibly still for a very long time.

The Green Pointsettia (Euphorbia dentata) started out as a weed, but looked too attractive to mow, so I waited to see how it would turn out. It was worth the wait to have a few patches of these handsome plants grace the back yard.

You might expect to see something like this Common Blue Wood Aster (Symphyotrichum cordifolium) in the Springtime, but this was taken in a creek bed in a local park in early December.

The following five pictures were taken in the Spring; the first three at a local cemetery and the others in a field just outside of Austin.

Field Madder (Sherardia arvensis):

Erect Bouchetia (Bouchetia erecta):

I couldn’t find a common name for this bug (Oncerometopus nigraclavus), but it certainly cuts a distinct figure among the green foliage:

The Dakota Mock Vervain (Glandularia bipinnatifida) photos are admittedly a bit overprocessed, but they appeared in a rather dull context and I wanted to simulate how their vibrant color jumped out from the drab background.

The last two pictures are of cultivated flowers from my neighbors’ yards. A rose by any other name is….well, there are over 320 species of rose, so they might go by any number of different names. The Seek app by iNaturalist (Thanks for the tip, Jerry!) couldn’t identify the species of this rose bud, and identified the second image as a China Rose (Rosa chinensis). Call them what you want, they’re nice to look at and I appreciate my neighbors for growing them!

After having had beginner’s luck with my old Canon Powershot, I went on a search for a more advanced camera I could feel comfortable with. I played around with a Canon EOS T21 and a Panasonic Lumix DC-ZS70 before settling on a Panasonic Lumix DX9 (for now). I have two large batches of photos from the T21 and the DC-ZS70 that were taken in Wisconsin last fall. My New Year’s resolution was to comb thru those and process a few a day until I ran out before going all in on using the DX 9. That would probably take a few months, and I’d planned on waiting till then to sift thru those for some I thought you could use, but I’m going to modify the resolution to keep working steadily at processing the pictures, but instead of waiting a few months to compile batches for you, I’ll try to put post submissions together as enough pictures become available. This feature adds a lot to WEIT, and I’m grateful to be able to contribute to it and want to see it keep going.

20 thoughts on “Readers’ wildlife photos”

  1. “This feature adds a lot to WEIT, and I’m grateful to be able to contribute to it and want to see it keep going.”

    Hear hear

  2. A good set! To me, the Texas wildlife is pretty exotic. I like also the soft out-of-focus backgrounds.

    1. Indeed! Here in Iowa I’ve been trying to find a way of making pictures of snow look interesting. So far, it’s just not happening, even though there’s plenty of snow to choose from.

      1. I suggest right after sunrise and right before sunset and look for places with drifts, sastrugi, or interesting shadows (from the snow shapes, trees, etc.).

        Nice thing about mid-winter: There’s often low-angle light to work with for much of the day.

        Good luck! Snow is hard to photograph.

        It’s also important to nail the exposure.

    2. Mark, I guess exotic is what you’re not used to. I was in Australia for a while and cockatoos seemed exotic, but when I got back home squirrels seemed exotic.

      Peter, snow sure is beautiful, and I can imagine how hard it must be to photograph! I’m sure YouTube has videos on how to get the lighting right. Keep shooting so we can see some Iowa snow!

      Oh, I made a mistake in the text. The newest camera is a GX 9, not DX. The first three and last two pictures were taken with that one.

  5. Frank Blair published an extended population study of Sceloporus olivaceus , entitled The Rusty Lizard, back in 1960. A lot of the work was done on his property, as I recall. It’s a nice mixture of quantitative ecology and natural history.

  12. Austin has some lovely flowers. Your volunteer Pointsettia is especially nice. Good thing you let it be. Very pretty shots. I love the lizard!

Comments are closed.