Please send in your good photos!

Today we have bird photos from two contributors. The first is reader Gary Miranda, whose IDs and comments are indented. Click the photos to enlarge them.

Here are a few that were taken at the Ridgefield Wildlife Refuge in southern Washington state.

Gary identified this as a “great ibis”, but it’s clearly not, as there’s no such bird. It isn’t even an American white ibis, so I’ll leave it to readers to identify. Is it an egret?

Northern harrier, [Circus hudsonius] juvenile

Red-tailed Hawk, light juvenile [Buteo jamaicensis]:

Bald Eagle [Haliaeetus leucocephalus] screaming at the sky or maybe the rain:

And from Bill Meyer:

Attached are a few recent, local wildlife photos.  I’m ready for spring but now is a great time to see our local woodpeckers.  First is a yellow-shafted [Northern] flicker (Colaptes auratus) from my yard in Grundy County, Illinois.

And, also from the backyard, our biggest, a pileated woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus).

A moment of zen on the temporarily serene Illinois River in Morris, Illinois.

The final two shots are from two days ago,  a red-bellied woodpecker (Melanerpes carolinus) and a relatively rare red-headed woodpecker (Melanerpes erythrocephalus) at a Will County Forest Preserve (Illinois).

I’m seriously low on photos; you don’t want this feature to disappear, do you? (I have about a week’s worth left.) Please send in your good ones!

Today’s batch comes from reader Bob Fritz. His captions are indented, and click on the screenshot to enlarge the photos:

Here are some bird photographs taken at Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve in Huntington Beach, California. The reserve has a mix of salt and freshwater marshes with many hiking trails, and hosts a wide variety of birds, mammals, and reptiles.

Rock Pigeon (Columba livia):

The Reddish Egret (Egretta rufescens) struts and spreads its wings while hunting for fish. In the first picture the left leg is bent back, causing it to appear like a pole behind the bird.

The Black Skimmer (Rynchops niger) flies low to catch its prey, with its narrow beak gliding through the water.

Bolsa Chica at sunset.  View facing north-west, with Pacific Coast Highway on the left.

Today we have some nice photos of (be still my heart) Antarctica taken by reader Mike Hannah, an evolutionist and paleontologist at the University of Victoria in Wellington, New Zealand. Mike’s captions and narrative are indented; click the photos to enlarge them.

I have been fortunate to spend five seasons in Antarctica as a palynologist on two scientific drilling projects – The Cape Roberts Project (1997 – 1999) and ANDRILL (2006 – 2007) . These pictures are all from my association with ANDRILL – it was the only time I got my camera to work!

 

The first image is of the American McMurdo Station on Ross Island (where New Zealand’s Scott Base is also situated). Although I was part of the New Zealand programme, we worked and were quartered in McMurdo, which has a population of over 1000 in summer. The photo was taken from the top of Observation Hill, where  a look out was kept for Scott and his party, hoping that they would return from the South Pole.

This is the view from my office window – across McMurdo Sound to the Royal Society Range – part of the Transantarctic Mountains.

As part of the project we got to visit the Dry Valleys – areas that are snow and ice free all year round – the winds are so strong that snow can’t accumulate. Flying into the Taylor Valley, you pass several beautiful ice falls.

Taylor Valley itself is stunningly beautiful, much of it free from snow and ice but with hanging glaciers dripping from the margins.

Another view of the Taylor Valley this time with the Taylor Glacier that fills one end of it, The black stripe running around the valley is the Ferrar Dolerite. The injection of this igneous rock as the supercontinent Gondwanaland broke up is associated with one of the planet’s mass extinctions.

 Mt Erebus, Antarctica’s only active volcano, dominates Ross island:

Across McMurdo sound is another volcano – Mt Discovery. I took this picture at about midnight in early January, and did not use any filters! If you look closely, there are Adelie penguins [Pygoscelis adeliae] in the foreground.

Finally, a much younger me on top of Observation Hill next to the cross erected by the survivors of Scott’s expedition in memory of Scott, Oates, Bowers, Wilson and Evans—all of whom perished on the return journey from the South Pole. The famous quote from Tennyson: ”To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” that they inscribed on the cross is now barely legible.