Readers’ wildlife photos

Today we have bird photos from Ephraim Heller’s trip to Brazil’s Pantanal region. Epheaim’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

These photos are from my July 2025 trip to Brazil’s Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland area and the world’s largest flooded grasslands. Today I have photos of a hodgepodge of ground and gamebirds.

Bare-faced Currasow (Crax fasciolata) male:

Black-capped Donacobius (Donacobius atricapilla):

Chestnut-bellied Guan (Penelope ochrogaster).

Gray-cowled Wood-Rail (Aramides cajaneus). Very shy and difficult to photograph:

Greater Rhea (Rhea americana) – Males are simultaneously polygynous, females are serially polyandrous. In practice this means that the females move around during breeding season, mating with a male and depositing their eggs with the male before leaving him and mating with another male. Males on the other hand are sedentary, attending the nests and taking care of incubation and the hatchlings all on their own. Although somewhat similar to ostriches, they diverged long ago and are only distantly related:

Guira Cuckoo (Guira guira):

Red-legged Seriema (Cariama cristata). Mug shots:

Scaled Dove (Columbina squammata):

Smooth-billed Ani (Crotophaga ani). A member of the cuckoo family:

Squirrel Cuckoo (Piaya cayana).

Sunbittern (Eurypyga helias) – A cryptic bird until it raises its wings, which have dramatic colors and patterns underneath. I captured these images after sunset at very slow shutter speeds. It wasn’t what I intended, but I like the blur on the second image: