Readers’ wildlife photos

Well, folks, this is the last batch I have, and then the feature goes silent. If you have photos, wake it up again! Thanks.

Today’s photos come from the lens of Pratyaydipta Rudra and show one of his favorite birds. Pratyay’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

This is the second part of Scissor-tailed Flycatchers (Tyrannus forficatus) photos that I have taken over the past few years after I moved to Oklahoma.  [JAC: Part 1 is here.] I don’t remember the exact date taken for each individual photo (all taken during the summer months), so I have skipped that information and included some stories behind each photo.

As much as I love to photograph these birds in a tight frame against the sky, it also gets boring after a while. So, I started thinking about different kinds of compositions by including other elements of the environment and sometimes putting the bird smaller in the frame.

This one took off from one of the Bald Cypress trees (Taxodium distichum) bordering our local lake. The golden light was beautiful:

Scissor-tailed Flycatcher catching what I believe is a soldier beetle, probably Chauliognathus pensylvanicus, but I might be wrong:

Got it!:

There was a nice meadow in a local park that used to have beautiful wildflowers every spring. The birds loved the area, and I liked photographing them among the wildflowers. But two years ago it was mowed down to make space for frisbee golf. While this may invite some more people to the park and let them enjoy the outdoors, I was sad that the wonderful habitat was lost. This is a photo that I took there before it was mowed down:

Scissortail hover hunting over the meadow:

Another one taking off to find dinner…:

Not all birds look equally good in silhouettes, but scissortails most definitely look very elegant:

Three silhouetted birds in territorial battle. It looked like there was a mated pair and one invader who was quickly chased away!:

Two of them vocalizing and flickering their wings during some territorial disputes:

Another sunset silhouette… An orange and black to honor my OSU connection:

I like the water of the lake as a better backdrop than the sky… This one predictably came back to its favorite twig as flycatchers (and dragonflies) often do!:

I was glad to capture this unique “chase sequence” involving a flycatcher and a speedboat. The bird won:

Probably my most favorite scissortail photo ever, and I never thought I would capture that using a 16-35mm lens! On this day, there was a thunderstorm in the afternoon, and the sky was decorated with beautiful mammatus clouds after the thunderstorm. I was walking around our house with my wide lens to capture some cloud images. At that time, a couple of scissortails were appearing in the neighborhood every evening, and I was wishing that one of them would show up. I like to say that adding a scissortail to any scene makes it more beautiful!:

As I was looking around, I found out that a male scissortail was sitting right on our pecan tree! I was incredibly excited, quickly increased my shutter speed, and waited for the bird to take off. This is one of the images I got after waiting for a couple minutes.

When I said “adding a scissortail to any scene makes it more beautiful”, I obviously didn’t mean adding them using AI to an existing image, and it applies to this one too where I was able to capture the bird flying across the rainbow after my waiting for that to happen for some time:

I would like to wrap up with this closer view of our state bird. This image reminds me of the box of the boardgame called “Wingspan”. I don’t know if any of you played it, but if you are into board games, you should try it. My wife and I played it over 500 times across different expansions and we still enjoy it so much: