Readers’ wildlife photos

Hey, you reprobates!  Send in your good wildlife photos if you have them. I know who you are!

Despite having just lost her beloved cat Natasha, ecologist Susan Harrison from UC Davis has some bird photos to share with us. Susan’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.

Lewis’s Woodpeckers and others

This is an irruption year in the Western US, in which large numbers of seed-eating birds have been on the move in fall.  One of these species, the Lewis’s Woodpecker (Melanerpes lewis), has just arrived en masse at our local Lake Solano County Park, where riparian forest lines a small gem of reservoir. These dramatic pink, ruby, and green birds are loosely social and nomadic, moving in flocks between sources of insects in summer and acorns in winter.  Unusually for woodpeckers, they catch insects on the wing, and use their drilling talents only to break acorns and cache them in bark crevices.

Excited by their arrival, I grabbed my camera and headed for Lake Solano. Only once did I catch a close-up woodpecker on the public side of the lake:

For the rest of the photos, I had to return with an inflatable boat and paddle across to the privately owned shore.  There, around 40 birds were foraging for acorns on Valley Oaks (Quercus lobata), caching them in Fremont Cottonwoods (Populus fremontii) and California Walnuts (Juglans californica), and sallying high overhead for insects:

From across the lake, I spied a large group bathing and drinking:

Because the bathing photos were too distant to be crisp, I asked ChatGPT to render one as an Impressionist painting in the style of Mary Cassatt (“The Bathing Party”):

Other lovely birds were seen en route to the Lewis’s Woodpeckers.

Green Heron (Butorides virescens) imitating a successful Wile E. Coyote:

Northern Flicker (Colaptes auratus) joining the woodpecker drinking party:

Phainopepla (Phainopepla nitens) looking handsome:

Common Mergansers (Mergus merganser) snorkeling together:

Common Merganser and Mallard sharing a sunny perch: (Anas platyrhynchos)L

Wood Ducks (Aix sponsa) being attentive to their mates: