Category: landscapes

Readers’ wildlife photos

March 6, 2026 • 8:15 am

Reader Todd Martin sent some photos from the Yucatán (don’t miss the Ocellated Turkey!).  Todd’s captions are indented and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

WEIT Yucatán

Here are some photos from a trip in November to the Yucatán in Mexico. The original purpose of the trip was to see Mayan ruins, but the natural beauty of the area turned out to be equally remarkable.

The first few pictures were taken during a boat tour of the mangroves in the Ría Lagartos Biosphere Reserve along the northern coast of the Yucatan Peninsula. The tour began at dawn and we were greeted by the rising sun and a welcoming committee of Monohelea maya, a species of predaceous midge discovered with some fanfare by scientists in 2000 (and with somewhat less fanfare on this very morning by myself):

The reserve is home to many species of birds, the most famous of which is the American flamingo (Phoenicopterus ruber), which can be observed trawling for brine-shrimp in the brackish water:

This is a Magnificent Frigatebird (Fregata magnificens). The male is easily recognized by the bright red throat pouch which looks like a life vest when inflated but actually serves to attract females. The females can be recognized by their frequent calls of ‘Well, if you’re so magnificent why can’t you take out the trash’:

The largest avian species we saw was this haughtily regal Brown pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis):

This is a Neotropic Cormorant (Nannopterum brasilianum) a diving bird sometimes used by the indigenous people of Bolivia and Peru to catch fish:

Hopefully this Wood Stork (Mycteria americana) has a good personality because it is (as my grandmother might have quipped) ‘not conventionally attractive’. It is, however, the only native stork in North America:

The Osprey (Pandion Haliaetus) is sometimes known as a fish hawk because fish make up the majority of its diet (not unlike Kevin Bacon or the singer Meatloaf):

Some birds are naturally elegant like this Great Egret (Ardea alba).In case you want to know how to avoid confusing it with a Snowy Egret … a Great Egret has a yellow bill and black feet, while the smaller Snowy Egret has a black bill and yellow feet:

Green Heron (Butorides virescens). Here’s a fun fact I cribbed from Wiki: “Green herons are one of the few species of bird known to use tools. In particular, they commonly use bread crusts, insects, or other items as bait. The bait is dropped onto the surface of a body of water to lure fish. When a fish takes the bait, the green heron then grabs and eats the fish”:

This American White Ibis (Eudocimus albus) was quite accustomed to people, which allowed me to get a pretty good close-up:

Morelet’s crocodile (Crocodylus moreletii). They look somewhat fearsome, but our one-armed tour boat operator said this one was ‘practically domesticated’”

Yucatan Jay (Cyanocorax yucatanicus) Jays are the noisy, argumentative neighbors of the animal kingdom. They are often described as ‘gregarious’ which I take to mean that they’ll take food from your plate without asking:

Those who frequented Glamour Shots in the 1980’s might confuse this photo with others of the genre, but it’s an Ocellated Turkey (Meleagris ocellata). The bird was the original inspiration for the marketing tag-line ‘taste the rainbow’. Unfortunately the bird is considered ‘Near Threatened’ by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) with numbers that are sadly on the decline:

Whoever named the Black Spiny-tailed Iguana (Ctenosaura similis) wasn’t particularly creative, but I’m inclined to give them a pass because … that spiny tail!:

Finally – we stopped by Florida before returning home and my wife couldn’t resist adopting one of those hairless sphynx cats from the local shelter (Alligator mississippiensis). We love him very much, though he does have the unusual habit of sleeping in his water dish:

No readers’ wildlife today; instead, we have my own photos from 2004-2006

February 26, 2026 • 9:15 am

Sadly, the tank has run dry.  To proffer some content today, I’ve dug into my personal photo bank and will post a few miscellaneous shots with brief captions. Click to enlarge the photos

Galápagos marine iguana, Amblyrhynchus cristatus, 2010:

Same trip, baby Galápagos sea lion, Zalophus wollebaeki:

Woman collecting land snails for dinner, São Tomé, 2004:

BBQ dinner at City Market, Luling, Texas, 2004. Brisket, sausage, and the trimmings (beans, potato salad, and the mandatory white bread):

Death Valley and a rare post-rain desert bloom, 2005.  Where do the insects come from since these blooms occur only about once a decade?  (If you can ID the lepidopteran, do so.)

Usually there is only saltbush and creosote growing on the land, but in a bloom all sorts of flowers emerge from dormant seeds:

A rare Jewish cowboy, photo in the Eastern California Museum in Independence. The last time I went the photo was gone and nobody knew about it or even remembered it. I’d kill to have it:

Mugging in the Alabama Hills, California:

Doing flies, 2005. This is what I spent most of my time doing before I retired.

Flying onto a glacier at Denali (Mt. McKinley).  They were dropping off two climbers in a four-seater bush plane, and I hitched a ride there and back. I got to sit next to the woman pilot. From Talkeetna, Alaska. The peak in the center is Denali.

After we landed on the snow-covered glacier, the pilot had to make a runway to take off from, going back and forth on the snow about ten times to pack it down:

The famous polymorphism of color and banding within the snail Cepaea nemoralis, studied intensively by evolutionary geneticists for years. Despite that work and subsequent population-genetic analysis, we still don’t understand the significance of the variation. For some reason the field was covered with snails; these were on a fencepost. Dorset, England, 2006:

The cottage where poet and author Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 and grew up. Upper Brockhampton, Dorset, 2006.

When Hardy became famous and wealthy, he moved to a house he designed (also in Dorset), Max Gate, where he lived from 1885 until he died in 1928.  In the garden by the house are the burial sites of his beloved dogs and cats.  Here are two graves of his cats, Snowdove and Kitsy; I was told that they were inscribed by Hardy himself, who had worked as a stonemason when younger, but I can’t vouch for that story:

A draft manuscript of the famous novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles  in Hardy’s hand (taken at the local museum):

T. E. Lawrence‘s (1888-1935) final residence the cottage called Clouds Hill. He lived here after he gave up his fame as “Lawrence of Arabia” and served in the RAF under the pseudonym “T. E. Shaw” beginning in 1935, commuting back and forth to the airbase on his motorcycle.  The cottage was very spartan, and had no electricity. As Wikipedia notes,

In a 1934 letter to Francis Rodd, Lawrence (who had changed his surname to Shaw) described his home thus:[5]

“The cottage has two rooms, one, upstairs, for music (a gramophone and records) and one downstairs for books. There is a bath in a demi-cupboard. For food one goes a mile, to Bovington (near the Tank Corps Depot) and at sleep time I take a great sleeping bag… and spread it on what seems the nicest floor… The cottage looks simple outside, and does no hurt to its setting which is twenty miles of broken heath and a river valley filled with rhododendrons run wild. I think everything, inside and outside my place, approaches perfection… Yours ever, T. E. Shaw”

Lawrence had an education in the classics, and is one of my heroes as he was both a man of action and a man of learning. Here’s the inscription in Greek over the door above: οὐ φροντὶς (“why worry”), taken from Hippoclides.

Lawrence’s bathtub and shaving mirror:

Lawrence died in a motorcycle crash on May 13, 1935, soon after leaving the RAF. Heading home on his motorcycle, he didn’t see two boys on bicycles ahead of him because of a dip in the road. Swerving to avoid them at the last moment, he crashed his bike, sustained a serious head injury, and died six days later.  A study of his death by a neurosurgeon who tended the dying Lawrence eventually led to the use of helmets by motorcyclists.

The crash site is a km or two from Clouds Hill, and my friend and I scoured the road on foot looking for the crash site, now marked by a memorial (I saw no dip in the road). We finally found the stone:

Ironically, there had been a car crash at the site right before we found the memorial:

When he crashed, Lawrence was riding a Brough Superior SS100 motorcycle. Here’s a picture of him from Wikipedia riding one (clearly not the death vehicle) that he called “George V”. If you go to Clouds Hill, you’ll see several of his motorcycles in a small garage. 

Lawrence on George V, Wikimedia Commons, author unknown

Readers’ wildlife photos

February 21, 2026 • 8:35 am

We have yet another batch of photos, this time from reader Jan Malik. Jan’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

During the recent bout of cold weather, I made a short trip to the New Jersey shore—Barnegat Light, a location known for wintering sea ducks. Most of the time it is a great place to see birds (and often harbor seals), but this time, with temperatures around 5°F and an exposed jetty blasted by incessant wind, animals were few and far between. Standing with the sun behind you—the usual orientation for decent photographs—meant exposing your face to the arctic wind, something tolerable only for a few seconds at a time. In these conditions I didn’t stay long, so what I have is a small set of photographs that could be titled: How birds survive bitterly cold weather.

American Herring Gulls (Larus smithsonianus). The sitting bird found a fish (in the lower right corner), but it was completely frozen, and even a perpetually hungry gull couldn’t swallow it. Instead, it was using it as “bait” to lure what I imagine is a female (judging by her slightly smaller size). Gulls normally defend their food aggressively, but they may share it with potential mates as the breeding season approaches. Note that the vocalizing gull is squatting to hide its bare feet and is facing into the wind—both strategies to minimize heat loss:

Barnegat Light lighthouse, built in 1859 and still functional. Note the frozen brackish water at the rock jetty, the result of prolonged low temperatures—a rare sight in New Jersey:

Distant Red‑breasted Merganser (Mergus serrator).  The second part of its scientific name refers to its serrated bill. This is a diving duck, so as long as some water remains open it should have access to food. The problem was that the channel was almost frozen solid near the jetty, where the shallow water normally suits these ducks best. In the center of the channel the water was full of drifting ice, and it was there—in deeper water, where catching fish is harder—that this bird had to feed:

A flock of ducks, probably Greater Scaup (Aythya marila).  Many birds in the flock were airborne, likely migrating locally in search of warmer weather and ice‑free water. None landed on the ice floes:

A Long‑tailed Duck (Clangula hyemalis) resting on a drifting ice floe and trying to limit heat loss by turning its body into the numbing wind.  This one is probably an immature male: it has extensive white plumage but has not yet developed the long tail feathers. Like mergansers and scaup, it is a diving duck that prefers relatively shallow water to the open ocean:

Wintering birds near the lighthouse, likely Yellow‑rumped Warblers (Setophaga coronata).  Despite the meaning of the first part of their scientific name (“insect eater”), they are unique among warblers in being able to survive harsh winters by feeding on berries. These birds were staying close to a pine–juniper thicket rich in waxy fruit. It is a small bird, as you can judge by the one perched on an average pinecone. They were puffing up their feathers to maximize insulation and staying low to the ground in sunny spots. This reduced wind exposure somewhat, but even so, with temperatures well below freezing, heat loss for such a small animal must have been substantial:

Another warbler, probably a female or a transitional male:

A large flock of American Robins (Turdus migratorius) near the parking lot. In New Jersey they are “migratorius” only in the sense that they vacate inland areas and winter closer to the barrier islands. This bird also puffs up its feathers considerably, appearing plumper than it really is:

All freshwater sources were frozen. Gulls could drink brackish water, but for songbirds it was a difficult time. A male robin began eating chunks of ice from a nearby snow pile. This is a last resort for birds—usually even in winter some freshwater is available, but not in this weather. Eating snow and ice carries an energy penalty because melting ice requires heat, which birds must then replace by finding more food:

Another wintering songbird, a common year‑round resident, the White‑throated Sparrow (Zonotrichia albicollis).  It was searching for anything edible in a snow‑and‑dirt pile left by a snowplow. After spending a little over an hour on the seashore, my face was numb and I retreated to my car. The birds stayed—they were far better prepared to brave the cold than a hairless ape:

Readers’ wildlife photos

February 17, 2026 • 8:15 am

As I am out of photos, and readers are withholding theirs, I once again steal the lovely photos of Australian Scott Ritchie from Cairns, whose Facebook page is here. Scott’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. .

I went to Melbourne during the middle of January to visit friends. Of course, birds are my feathered friends. This report cover a visit to the WTP, Western Treatment Plant, at Werribee, Victoria. These names pass mythically from the lips of Australian birders. I’ve been there before and really enjoyed it, but this past trip was wild. WTP is a series of quite large, secondary sewage treatment ponds, and lagoons. These abut along the great Southern Ocean and you get this wonderful interaction of freshwater and saltwater wetlands and associated birds. These are used, particularly in our summer, as overwintering sites for migratory shorebirds. But there’s a lot of resident waterfowl and waders there too. The WTP is so valued that you have to have a key to the gate for access to the site. Fortunately, my friend David was a key-carrying twitcher.

The weather was crazy, with 45 KPH winds. One of the first things I discovered was that strong winds can really mess with a telephoto lens. My lens was being buffeted by the gusty, easterly winds to the point where I had to remove the lens hood to stabilise the camera. But a few interesting things happen because of the wind. It was a great opportunity for BIF shots; birds in flight. Birds generally take-off and land into the wind, and because it was so strong, they were moving quite slowly. So I got nice shots of normally very fast birds such as terns and sandpipers as they came into land. Attached are some fun pics.

The next day I did a short walk through Banyule Flats Reserve, an urban Melbourne wetland. The highlight was to see the oh so cute Owlet Nightjar, as well as a family of Tawny Frogmouths. Shout out to Lyn Easton for leading the tour.

A Black Swan Beach. The high winds packed the east facing beach with seagrass. And the Black Swans [Cygnus stratus] made for the buffet:

A beach of Blacks Swans, necks writhing like snakes:

Amazing!

“Ahh, now that feels good.” An Australian Spotted Crake [Porzana fluminea] enjoys the breeze up its bum:

“Bugger off!” But is not happy with the hordes of shore flies:

An immature Black-shouldered Kite [Elanus axillaris] gives us the eye:

Whiskered Terns [Chlidonias hybrida] cruised flew slowly against the wind, providing good views for the camera:

. . . and another:

A Black Kite [Milvus migrans] swings down to pick up a dead little bird that have been by a car:

A large flock of Australian shelducks [Tadorna tadornoides] into the WTP. It was great to see large numbers of waterfowl darken the skies:

I had fun shooting small short birds, as they say, coming into land against the wind at adjacent pool. This is a Rednecked Stint [Calidris ruficollis]:

And here comes a Sharp-tailed Sandpiper [Calidris acuminata]:

A family of Tawny Frogmouths [Podargus strigoides] greet the day at Banyule Flats Reserve:

But he poses stoically, “You can’t see me!”  Frogmouths sit still, imitating dead branches and stumps:

A bit of a loose feather gives him away:‘

 

An Owlet-Nightjar [Aegotheles sp.] peaks out of his hole hollow. He stared at all the photographers down below. We must’ve started him because then he just disappeared. But we waited and waited:

“Come on, take your pictures!” He suddenly popped up, posing nicely:

Readers’ wildlife photos

February 16, 2026 • 8:15 am

Dean Graetz has come through with a set of images from the outback of Australia. His notes and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. Dean has added links to two videos, one of them his.

And send in your wildlife photos! Once again, this is the last batch I have.

Australian Landscape Images

Being geo-patriots, we frequently travelled and camped in the remote Australian Outback, aka ‘The Bush’, which is about 70% of the continental area.  Our interest was landscapes – their vista, and the living and fossil lifeforms they contained.  Here is a series of landscape photos chosen by their appeal summarised as one word.

Bliss

Dusk: Site chosen on extensive plain – see horizon.  A table set for two, one-saucepan meal on gas burner, and swags (bedroll) to be positioned and occupied last.  A near cloudless sky with dry airmass promises a dome of stars all night.  Bliss!:

Beginning

It is always entrancing to witness the silent illumination and transient colours of a landscape as our world turns to the Sun.  Always, you see detail and colours that you didn’t appreciate during the previous dusk.  This is a sandy bed of a large but ephemeral creek – a great campsite.  The stark, dead (Eucalypt) trees germinated with the 1974 floods only to be killed by a wildfire some 20 years later.  Such is life:

Reboot

A ‘Spinifex’ (actually Triodia) grassland wildfire: hot and lethal, reducing all in its path to ashes.  This hummock grassland type covers about 25% of the continent.  Ignited by lightning or people, such fires are frequent.  With the first rain post-fire, the Triodia regenerates from seed and roots, faster than competing woody plants.  So, repeated fires – burning your neighbours – is a sustainable way to persist:

Success

Heavy rains in 2009 triggered a massed pelican breeding.  Thousands of birds gathered at one location, mated and successfully bred.  More details are here.  Success in this time-dependent gamble is shown by the chicks (darker heads) are now as large as the parent birds.  All life is a Game: If you win , you stay in the Game:

Bugger

A feral camel (Dromedary [Camelus dromedarius] single hump) enjoying an uncommonly lush grassland.  Imported in the mid-1800s, camels facilitated the exploration and settlement of Outback Australia.  Displaced by motorized vehicles in the1920s, instead of a bullet, they were abandoned to die out.  But they didn’t.  Then a couple of hundred camels is now a large feral population of at least 600,000 damaging pests – a significant multi-million dollar problem.  In the Southern Hemisphere, a well-intentioned action resulting in a disastrous outcome is widely known as a Bugger, made famous by this Toyota video:

Mute

A rock engraving, a graphic message from a pre-literate time, meticulously pitted on a vertical rock face.  What can be inferred from it?  In order of certainty, it was done by a male, likely over a working period of 3-5 days, at least 10,000 years ago.  In spite of much speculation, we cannot ever really know the message or the audience, a realization that sometimes evokes a puzzling tinge of sadness:

Harsh

The Pilbara region is Australia’s harshest landscape.  It is hot –(recorded 160 consecutive days of above 100°F (38°C)), and essentially water- and treeless, and rendered unfriendly by the swarm of small spiny hummocks of Spinifex (Triodia).  Yet prospectors and geologists continue to search here for mineral riches.  After we found the rocks containing a fossil stromatolite, dated at 3.4 billion years, and then thinking about Deep Time, we forgot about the current temperature and Spinifex spines:

Serenity

Why do we find a slow-flowing river so timeless, relaxing and peaceful?  In 1925, two men, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, wrote their explanation as the words of the song ‘Old Man River’.  A truly timeless contribution to our culture that you are probably silently singing right now:

Awe

This image captures a mind-stretching contrast in ages between the biological world and the geological world.  In the foreground are several species of ephemeral  plants – bright, colourful, with a life spans of months to a year or so.  In the background, the blood red rocks looking sharp edged and resistant, are dated at more than 2.5 billion years.  The smallest units of geological dating, millions of years, are beyond the reckoning of biologists, yet life was present on earth when those background rocks were being formed.  The Deep Time of Life is right up there with the Rocks:

Me

A densely painted gallery in Arnhem Land, northern Australia.  The gallery contains older figures – devil-devil figures (LHS), a python and several crocodiles (Middle) – all overpainted by numerous, modern (less than 100 years) ‘hands’.  The ‘hands’ are not stencils or imprints.  They are deliberate drawings infilled with colour.  The overall impression of the modern ‘hands’ layer is just exuberant happiness celebrating ‘Me’, ‘Look at Me’, by the many painters who contributed.  No deep cultural significance just an expression of the ‘joy of life’ in vivid colour.  The longer you scan this image, the more surely you will smile:

Renewal

It was a hurried camp selected in falling light with the best site option being a desert track in the sea of (flowering) Spinifex.  All that is forgotten now as you slowly wake in the golden light of a quiet and calm dawn, along with the smell of dew-dampened sand.  Life is good!:

Readers’ wildlife photos

February 8, 2026 • 8:15 am

Today’s photos come from Ephraim Heller, who took photos at Yellowstone. Ephraim’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

I spent the last week of January in Yellowstone National Park hoping to photograph a wide variety of wildlife. It was a surprisingly unsuccessful trip. While the bison and coyotes cooperated, I never spotted any other mammals. Absent were foxes, wolves, otters, martens, ermine, bobcats, mountain lions, bighorn sheep, and mountain goats. I suspect that it was due to a combination of bad luck and the least snow in everyone’s memory, so (a) it was harder to spot wildlife in the sagebrush, and (b) animals were up in the hills rather than in the valleys and on the roads. Too bad!

American Bison (Bison bison):

Coyotes (Canis latrans):

Pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) during blue hour, after sunset:

Common ravens (Corvus corax) discussing politics:

Elon Musk’s new Robo-Raven? Raven Model X? Or just another banded raven wearing a transmitter to stay connected to social media?:

A bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus):

American dipper (Cinclus mexicanus):

The folks with whom I was traveling wanted to visit the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center, a nonprofit wildlife park located in the town of West Yellowstone. I normally don’t photograph animals in zoos. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel, which is a poor metaphor because shooting fish in a barrel with a camera would be quite challenging. So the wolves (Canis lupus) and grizzly bear (Ursus arctos horribilis) in the following photos are not wild.

I also normally don’t shoot landscapes, but I liked the mood of the morning steam rising from this pool at the Mammoth Hot Springs:

Readers’ wildlife photos

January 27, 2026 • 8:15 am

This is the last batch I have, so please send in your good wildlife photos. I know some of you out there are hoarding them. Don’t make me beg!

Fortunately, UC Davis math professor Abby Thompson has sent some photos of life in tide pools. Abby’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.

The weather over New Year’s was stormy; most of these pictures were taken when the rain let up for a few hours.   There are generally fewer creatures visible at this time of year in any case-—the big surge in intertidal species happens in the spring in Northern California.   An exception was one particular species of nudibranch,  Phidiana hiltoni, of which there were dozens for some reason.

Genus Heptacarpus (some kind of shrimp). Not a great photo, but the color is true, and if you look closely you can see she’s carrying eggs:

Superfamily Mytiloidea (some kind of mussel). Tidepools make you very aware of how much we don’t know.  This mussel species moved into my local pools in 2022, and this ID is still the best I have for it:

Pisaster ochraceus (Ochre star) Admiring his reflection:

Pollicipes polymerus (Gooseneck barnacle). The red “lips” on this cluster (common this time of year) I’ve read variously are because of the shade they’re in, the cool weather, high hemoglobin levels, or all of the above:

A baby gooseneck barnacle:

Velutina velutina (velvet shell snail):

Family Ampithoidae (some kind of amphipod). Again not a great photo but the spectacular color is true. The next photo shows the whole animal:

Family Ampithoiuidae:

Phidiana hiltoni (nudibranch) This was the species there were dozens of, with very few other species putting in an appearance:

It cleared up just at sunset one day, for this nice view over Bodega Head: