Category: landscapes

Readers’ wildlife photos

July 12, 2026 • 8:15 am

We’re running out of wildlife contributions—I suppose we always are, but this is the last batch on hand. You know what to do if you have good photos.

Today we continue with Ephraim Heller’s photos from a recent trip to Namibia.  Ephraim’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them:

Today I continue my series on a May-June 2026 visit to Namibia. I’m organizing the posts by habitat, in the order of our visits, so that you get a sense of the ecosystems. Today’s post features the Skeleton Coast, yet another coastal desert region.

Stretching 500 km along the Atlantic, the Skeleton Coast is where the cold, nutrient-rich waters of the Benguela Current collide with the Namib Desert, producing dense coastal fogs most mornings. The indigenous San once called the region “the Land God Made in Anger.” Portuguese mariners knew it as the Gates of Hell.

The name “Skeleton Coast” has a dual origin. It first referred to the vast quantities of whale and seal bones that once littered the beaches, remnants of the 19th- and early-20th-century whaling industry. Over time the moniker also came to encompass the skeletal remains of the ships wrecked along one of the most dangerous coastlines in the world. There are about 300 recorded shipwrecks, with a total of >1,000 estimated over centuries. Persistent, dense fog reduces visibility to near zero for days at a time. Strong, unpredictable currents and heavy surf pound the beaches. Offshore rocks and poorly charted shoals lie just beneath the surface. Before modern navigation systems, the featureless desert coastline offered almost no landmarks, and any shipwrecked sailor who managed to reach shore faced a waterless, nearly lifeless desert.

One of the most dramatic wrecks occurred in late November 1942 and the story was told in the book “Skeleton Coast” (John Marsh, 1944). The British refrigerated cargo ship MV Dunedin Star, carrying passengers, crew, and war supplies, struck a submerged obstacle. The master beached the vessel about 550 yards offshore. A motor lifeboat managed to ferry 63 of the 106 passengers and crew to the desolate beach before it was disabled by the heavy surf, leaving the remaining 43 people stranded on the breaking-up ship and those ashore with almost no supplies. What followed was a >2 month rescue operation that itself was plagued by bad luck and the difficult conditions of the Skeleton Coast. Here’s a photo of the Dunedin Star (courtesy of bluestarline.org):

Within hours of the distress signal reaching Walvis Bay, the South African tug Sir Charles Elliot and the minesweeper HMSAS Nerine set out, soon joined by the cargo ships Temeraire and Manchester Division. A land convoy of trucks departed from Windhoek and crossed the roadless desert to reach the survivors on the beach.

South African Air Force Lockheed Ventura aircraft flew supply drops, many of which were swept away by the wind and currents. One aircraft landed on what appeared to be firm ground only to sink into a salt pan, becoming stranded. Several weeks later, a recovery party returned for the plane. After on-site repairs and several days of digging the plane free, they managed to get it airborne again on January 29, 1943. The aircraft flew for about 43 minutes before one of the engines failed and it crashed into the sea. The crew survived the ditching, swam ashore, and were rescued by the returning land convoy a couple of days later.

While all of the Dunedin Star passengers and crew survived and returned to port by late December, 1942, some of the rescuers did not return until early February, 1943. However, the tug Sir Charles Elliot grounded near Rocky Point while returning, with two crew members losing their lives.

Enough with the history lesson. Now for the animals:

Cape fur seals (Arctocephalus pusillus pusillus) are the most conspicuous animals on the coast, with breeding colonies reaching more than 100,000–200,000 individuals during the November–December peak. The colony that I saw numbered about 1,000:

Males establish and vigorously defend harems of up to ~50 females, fasting for weeks while defending territory:

We saw (and smelled) many pup carcasses. High pup mortality from stampeding, predation, and starvation is the norm. The carcasses are the primary food for scavenging jackals and hyenas:

Black-backed jackals (Lupulella mesomelas) are one of the most basal extant wolf-like canids, with a fossil record extending back 2-3 million years and relatively little morphological change since the Pleistocene. On the Skeleton Coast their diet is opportunistic: they take seal pups and afterbirth, scavenge carcasses, and hunt birds and small mammals. Their kidneys are adapted to water scarcity, allowing them to thrive where freestanding water is absent:

Brown hyenas (Parahyaena brunnea) are the rarest of the living hyenas (global population 4,000–10,000) and is listed as Near Threatened. Sightings are rare, as they are shy and nocturnal. I was very lucky:

Along the Skeleton Coast they are beachcombers, ranging long distances at night to feed on seal carcasses, abandoned pups, and whatever jackals or other predators leave behind. Their jaws and dentition crack bones that many other carnivores cannot process. They live in small, stable clans (typically 4–6 related individuals) but forage largely alone. All clan members help provision cubs at communal dens:

Just inland from the beach begin the sand dunes. In this apparently sterile environment, I found a tractrac chat (Emarginata tractrac):

I normally don’t post lodge photos, but the lodge at which I stayed was remarkable both for its architecture and isolation. At over 120 km to the nearest village and over 400 km to the nearest paved road, I believe that it may be the most remote place I have slept. The buildings have a nautical motif:

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 29, 2026 • 8:15 am

Today we have photos from Jan Malik taken at Cape May, New Jersey emphasizing the bizarre horseshoe crabs, which are not crustaceans but chelicerates, more closely related to spiders and scorpions than to real crabs.  Jan’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.

People visit Cape May, NJ, in spring, mostly to see the migrating birds, but what makes the high density of animal migrants and residents possible in that area is in large part hidden in the water. Delaware Bay is home to a large population of the Atlantic horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus) which spawn around the time the migrating birds pass through. Horseshoe crabs’ eggs, along with crabs themselves, are an important link in the food chain that fuels the spring migration.

Early morning visitors to the Delaware Bay side of Cape May are welcomed by the ruckus made by Laughing Gulls (Leucophaeus atricilla). These birds nest locally but also depend on the crabs as a major food source:

Walking onto the beach in the morning after a high tide, a visitor will see these animals stranded helplessly on their backs, flipped by the waves:

Here is a larger female with a male still attached. All three parts of a crab are visible: the main body (prosoma) with mouth and legs, an abdomen (opisthosoma) with book gills and a tail (telson). What can be also seen here are male’s pincers, modified forelegs used to grasp the carapace of the female:

The crabs are not blind thanks to their pair of compound eyes. They also have 8 other simple eyes and ocelli distributed on top of their carapace and additional photosensors underneath and on the telson. These organs are sensitive to UV and visible light and are used to detect phases of the lunar cycle and determine when to come out of water onto the sand to mate and lay eggs:

The primary function of a telson is to help the animal steer and to right itself in water. On dry land, however, it is of little help and a flipped crab, if left on its own, usually succumbs to desiccation or is preyed upon by other animals:

 A human visitor to the beach has to decide whether to save the crab or leave it to die and let birds have their fill. In my case I usually flip them back on, giving them a chance to live another day. They are used by the medical industry to develop a test for the presence of bacteria in medical devices, which involves catching them, drawing about a quarter of their blood and then releasing them, but such a crab is then greatly weakened and mortality is high:

A Sanderling (Calidris alba) eating a horseshoe crab egg. For some evolutionary reason, these marine arthropods must leave the water in order to lay eggs. They prefer to do the laying at high tide, hence the lunar phase detection. The eggs may be then uncovered by waves and spread far and wide on the beach:

The waves may also uncover a whole cluster of eggs which is then found by shorebirds patrolling the ecotone between the sea and the land:

This is what the washed up eggs look like; eggs are 1.5 mm to 2 mm in diameter and they grow as the embryos inside them grow. This is the main fuel for the thousands of plovers, sanderlings, turnstones, red knots and others on their way toward the Arctic:

Using a macro lens, one can make out an embryo inside, complete with legs, telson and tiny eyes:

I think it was only at the beginning of this century that the significance of these “crabs” (which have a common ancestor with spiders and scorpions) for migrating birds was properly recognized and some harvesting bans were put in place in NJ and Delaware. Before, they would be harvested in excess as crab bait or just for fertilizer. This picture shows how they can be a host to barnacles and limpets:

Even though they can and do come onshore during daytime, they prefer nighttime at high tide, at new or full moon. In the Delaware Bay, many thousands of them come out then, males crowding around the females to claim the best spot and be first to fertilize eggs. They must have been doing similar things for many millions of years – earliest fossils with similar body plans date back to Paleozoic era, 450 mya, which was well before the dinosaurs. Fossils quite similar to the Atlantic crab date back 200 mya. There were many species but now only four are left, this site presents a neat diagram illustrating their evolutionary history:

Just to give a sense of scale, here is a “scrum” of crabs around human feet:

Spring migration attracts many visitors to Cape May, benefiting local businesses. I think it is just to also count humans as dependent on these “crabs”, to an extent. Note that the forefront crab has a tag from the US Fish and Wildlife Services, allowing it to track the animal:

 

 

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 26, 2026 • 8:30 am

We can keep going for two days after this, but if you got photos, please send ’em. Thanks.

Today’s batch is from Ephraim Heller, continuing his photos from a recent trip to Namibia. Ephraim’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his pictures by clicking on them. Don’t miss the chameleon with its tongue extended!

Today I continue my series on a May-June 2026 visit to Namibia. I’m organizing the posts by habitat, in the order of our visits, so that you get a sense of the ecosystems. My last post focused on the Namib desert. This post focuses on my next destination, Swakopmund, a cold, fog-covered town along the Namib desert’s Atlantic coast.

Annual rainfall is less than 20 mm, but the town experiences ~180 days/year of thick fog, generated offshore when the cold Benguela Current contacts warm desert air. The fog typically settles in the early morning hours and burns off by mid-morning. The fog provides moisture that enables some vegetation to grow in a strip along the ocean. In addition, there is a small, brackish estuary at the mouth of the ephemeral Swakop River that supports marine birds. This photo, taken with my iPhone on an after-dinner stroll from a restaurant to our hotel, gives you a sense of the fog:

A herd of dromedary camels (Camelus dromedarius) grazing along the shoreline often startles visitors to Swakopmund. Dromedaries are not native to Africa. The species was domesticated on the southeastern Arabian Peninsula about 4,000 years ago and has not occurred naturally in the wild for nearly 2,000 years. They were imported to Namibia by the German colonial troops in 1889 for use as military pack animals in what was then German South West Africa. The animals I saw grazing along the shore are used by a local company for tourist rides. This is a handsome individual:

However, not everyone gets to ride the camels:

The most impressive aspect of our stay in Swakopmund was a short “living desert” safari. A guide took us on a walk and drive in the sand dunes immediately around the town. Where I saw pristine sand, the guide saw the telltale marks of animals burrowed in the sand.

The first individual he unearthed was a desert sidewinding adder (Bitis peringueyi), a small, ambush predator. The one he found was about 15 cm (6 in) in length. The eyes are positioned on top of the head rather than on the sides, adapted to allow the adder to bury itself in loose sand, leaving only the eyes exposed at the surface while waiting for prey. Prey includes sand lizards and barking geckos, which also provide most of the adder’s water needs. I took these close-up photos with my macro lens – kids, don’t try this at home:

Next, our guide uncovered a buried Namib sand gecko (Pachydactylus rangei), certainly the most charismatic of the desert critters. The large feet with webbed toes are good for running on loose sand and for excavating burrows. They burrow into dunes by day to escape the heat, emerging after dark to hunt insects and spiders.

These geckos also emerge during fog events and allow droplets to condense on their skin, then lick water from their own faces and bodies. In 2021 researchers reported that P. rangei produces a neon-green biofluorescence under UV and moonlight conditions using a new mechanism in terrestrial vertebrates. I wish I had known this at the time so I could have photographed them under moonlight. Regardless, these are clearly very happy creatures:

Of course, no visit to the Namib desert dunes is complete without a FitzSimon’s burrowing skink (Typhlacontias brevipes). The FBS is blind, legless, just a few inches long, and spends its entire life burrowed in the sand. The species has reduced eyes without eyelids and no visible external ear openings. It detects prey (ants, termites, ant-lions, and small beetles) by sensing the vibrations they produce when moving through sand:

Finally, our living desert guide found surface critter: a Namaqua chameleon (Chamaeleo namaquensis). The Namaqua chameleon is one of the largest chameleons in southern Africa (up to 25 cm or 9.8 in), and unusual in the family for being terrestrial rather than arboreal. In the early morning, this chameleon darkens to near black to maximize heat uptake; as body temperature rises, it lightens toward grey-brown to reduce absorption. Water is obtained through the diet, from morning dew, and through hygroscopic skin that absorbs moisture by capillary action (wow!). Nasal salt glands excrete excess sodium chloride and potassium, allowing salts to be processed without renal water loss:

The eyes can move independently, looking in different directions:

The tail is shorter than those of arboreal chameleons, and has lost its prehensile abilities:

The guide had some mealworms with which to entice the chameleon. It’s tongue was so fast its movement was hard to see with the naked eye:

Now for the birds. First up, a colorful common waxbill (Estrilda astrild):

Next, a common but lovely speckled pigeon (Columba guinea) with an excellent hair stylist and makeup artist:

A portrait of another common but colorful bird, the helmeted guinea fowl (Numida meleagris). This one looks pensive:

We took a tourist boat cruise to see the Cape fur seal (Arctocephalus pusillus pusillus) colony near Walvis Bay. The Cape fur seal population along the southwest African coast is estimated at 1.5 – 2 million animals, roughly two-thirds of which occur along the Namibian coast.

Cape fur seals are eared seals (family Otariidae) rather than true seals. Unlike true seals, which move on land by undulating their bodies, otariids can rotate their hind flippers forward and walk on all four limbs, giving them considerably more agility.

During breeding season, bulls fight to establish territories and maintain harems of 5 to 25 females. A bull may lose nearly half his body mass over the six-week breeding season without leaving his territory to feed. Mothers leave their pups on shore while they feed in the ocean. When they return to shore, mothers and pups find each other by making unique vocalizations, amazing in colonies of tens of thousands of animals.

Seal colonies on land are predated by black-backed jackals and brown hyenas, who target pups. At sea, they are preyed upon by white sharks and killer whales. Here’s a photo from the boat:

I’ll have more cape fur seal photos in a future post.

Our guide on the boat feeds fish to the great white pelicans (Pelecanus onocrotalus). While I don’t support baiting, one of the pelicans landed on the boat for its free meal, enabling me to get this portrait:

Reader’s wildlife photos

June 23, 2026 • 8:15 am

Why is this feature like lox and a schmear? A: Because it’s on a roll. (Sort of.) I now have a total of four sets of photos in the queue, one of which I’ll post today. But please send your good photos, and a warm handshake to those who have done so.  I hope people realize that readers who send in good add a unique feature for this website: high-quality and delightful pictures of nature. Do compliment the photographer if you like their photos.

Today we have pictures from Ephraim Heller, documenting his recent trip to Namibia. (More will be coming.) Ephraim’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Today I begin a series on a May-June 2026 visit to Namibia. I’m organizing the posts by habitat, in the order of our visits, so that you get a sense of the ecosystems.

The Namib Desert is the oldest desert on earth, with conditions that have persisted for 55 – 80 million years. At ~80,950 square km (31,250 sq mi), it is far and away the largest desert I have visited. It stretches ~2,000 km (1,200 mi) along southwest Africa’s Atlantic coast, including the entire length of Namibia. There is essentially no rain at all near the coast (2 mm/year average), but in places there is coastal fog that is the primary source of water for the desert plants. The stable climate over millions of years has resulted in high endemism. Of the ~3,500 documented species in the Namib, more than 1,000 are endemics.1-2. On the drive from the capital, Windhoek, visitors pass through Solitaire. It consists of a fuel station, a bakery and café, a general store, a small lodge, and a yard decorated with old vehicles. The nearest real town is hundreds of kilometers distant. When vehicles broke down, cars and trucks were simply left. Some of the collection includes American classics from the mid-twentieth century:

While having lunch at a picnic table in Solitaire, I observed several yellow mongooses (Cynictis penicillata) playing. Technically, Solitaire is semi-desert, so there are a few shrubs for the mongoose. They often share burrow systems with the local ground squirrels (Xerus inauris), which confused me as I tried to decide if I was seeing mongooses or ground squirrels. This is a mongoose:

Our destination in the Namib desert was Sossusvlei, where the sand dunes are among the highest in the world. “Dune 7” dune, the tallest, is 388 m (1,273 ft) in height. Vlei is the Afrikaans word for “marsh,” while sossus is Nama for “no return” or “dead end”.  The area is the drainage basin for the ephemeral Tsauchab river. The Namib Sand Sea, of which the Sossusvlei dune field is a part, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The dunes began forming around five million years ago. Sand from the Orange River was carried west into the Atlantic, swept north by the Benguela Current, then driven back inland by the prevailing south-southwest winds. Over millions of years the sand accumulated into a dune field ~32,000 sq km (12,400 sq mi) in extent. The sand is iron-oxide coated quartz, and younger sand near the base of dunes is paler while older sand higher up is a deeper reddish-orange, due to greater oxidation. The colors in these photos are real, and not simply me going wild with the saturation slider in my photo editing software. For scale, note the full-grown trees at the base of the dune in the first photo.

About a kilometer walk across the sand lies a small clay pan named Deadvlei (meaning “dead marsh”) where reside camelthorn trees (Vachellia erioloba) that have been dead for 600 – 900 years. There has been no water here since the fourteenth century! The combination of extreme dryness and intense heat inhibits microbial activity so thoroughly that the wood is preserved.

Gemsbok (Oryx gazella) and springbok (Antidorcas marsupialis) antelope are the primary large mammals of the Namib. Gemsbok can survive for extended periods without drinking free-standing water, meeting their requirements through vegetation. Here is a gemsbok in its habitat:

Here is a herd of springbok in their environment:

Toktokkie beetles (Onymacris unguicularis) are a group of darkling beetles with over 200 species in Namibia, and 20 in the Namib desert. We saw them throughout Namibia. I don’t know the species of this individual, but some species engage in fog-harvesting: when Atlantic fog rolls in, beetles climb to the crests of dunes and orient head-downward, body inclined away from the wind. Water condenses on the elytra, runs along ridges on the beetle’s back, and reaches the mouthparts. A beetle can take in water equivalent to ~40% of its body mass from a single fog event.

The garden locust or tree locust (Acanthacris ruficornis), is widespread across sub-Saharan Africa. Tt is technically a grasshopper:

Namaqua doves (Oena capensis) are ubiquitous, but I think they are pretty. They are the smallest doves on the African continent:

The Kalahari tree skink (Trachylepis spilogaster). I had no idea that some skinks are arboreal:

The extreme dryness and very low population density of Namibia make it one of the prime sites for astronomical observatories and night sky photographers:

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 21, 2026 • 8:15 am

Today’s collection is from math prof Abby Thompson at UC Davis, who sends us intertidal photos from California. Abby’s IDs and captions are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.

The photos were taken at Dillon Beach.

Orienthella piunca (nudibranch), with eggs (the white squiggly things), and a small crab spectating”:

Crab tracks- these always look to me like some complicated bicycle tire track, but apparently it’s just what happens if you skitter sideways on your claws. The crab is buried in the sand at the end of the trail, close-up in the next photo:

Crab- probably Romaleon antennarium, Pacific rock crab. Hunkering down, waiting for the tide to come back in:

Epiactis handi (sea anemone).  This is the unusual species of Epiactis which seems to occur only in a single (and hard-to-access) location near me.   I like to check in on them periodically:

Aegires albopunctatus (nudibranch) Salt-and-pepper nudibranch:

Pycnogonum stearnsi (Sea spider). Nestled into the seaweed, completely out of the water, on top of a rock:

Emerita analoga (Pacific sand crabs). Walking the beach at low tide sometimes it looks as though the sand is puckered- that’s likely to be bevy of some kind of tiny sand crab.     This photo shows the “puckering” from a distance of a few feet:

Pacific sand crabs from close up. A footstep will spook them, and they bury themselves completely in a split second.  Not a great photo, but if you look carefully I think you can see each one has its stalked eyes poking up:

Mopalia muscosa (mossy chiton). The inside of the shell- the animal is long gone, leaving these beautiful interior colors:

The beach at sunrise.

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 15, 2026 • 8:30 am

We have a batch of photos, sans captions, from reader Roger Lambert, who does give an introduction (indented below). His words are indented:

We just had a bit of a heat wave this past week in Vermont, so I have some photos for your consideration of Vermont’s rivers and lakes to cool folks off.

Looking east over Lake Champlain at sunset from a cabin we rented with friends.

Looking southwest into sunset from Burlington Waterfront which has a marina.

Looking due west from SandBar State park on Lake Champlain with heavy fog rolling in:

Looking north, also from SandBar park at shoreline along South Hero. New York State is about ten miles to the west:

View of the Otter Creek as it passes through the center of Middlebury, Vt.:

View to the west at sunset with dock, from a (different) rental property on Lake Champlain:

 View of a perennially flooded section of a wildlife preservation area just south of SandBar State park. This was a set-up shot for focus and composition at dusk. I wanted to to take a long-exposure picture illuminated by moonlight after dark, but as i waited in the dark for the moon, I heard an animal with fairly heavy footsteps coming towards me on the shore. I got the heck out of Dodge!:

iew of the LaMoille River from just north of Cambridge, VT. According to Google: “The name “LaMoille” is famously considered a geographical accident. Early French explorers originally named the waterway La Mouette (River of the Gulls) due to the abundance of shorebirds, but a mapmaker famously forgot to cross the “T”s, leaving La Mouelle—which eventually morphed into Lamoille”.  There is a home about twenty feet to the right out of picture on that outcropping of rock – an exciting place to live!:

View looking west directly into the sunset on Arrowhead Mountain Lake in East Georgia, Vt. This is an HDR image using seven different exposures in Photoshop before it could be done automatically. It was about a 25-step process to set up exposure gradients, and at one point required pressing four keys simultaneously. And it didn’t work!  Later, I discovered that there was a typo in my instructions, and when I pressed those four keys, and it worked, I let out a war whoop so loud that my wife rushed in thinking I was having a heart attack.:

Readers’ wildlife photos

April 10, 2026 • 8:15 am

Ecologist Susan Harrison has contributed some photos from one of my favorite places in the U.S.—and a former field site—Death Valley, California (there are also photos from Arizona). Susan’s IDs and captions are indented, and you can (and should) enlarge her photos by clicking on them.

A March heat wave spent in the desert

Hearing reports of the best desert wildflowers in 10 years, my husband and I eagerly planned a late March camping trip to Death Valley.   Alas, when my final exams were over, a record-breaking heat wave was already ending the displays of Desert Gold (Geraia canescens), Hairy Sand Verbena (Abronia villosa), various scorpionweeds (Phacelia) and evening primroses (Oenothera), and others.

What to do??  Luckily, the deserts contain a lot of elevation. Near Telescope Peak (elevation 11,043’), the highest point in Death Valley National Park, the snow lingered and wildflowers hadn’t yet bloomed, but at least the hiking was pleasant.

Telescope Peak, center, with Death Valley on the left and Panamint Valley on the right:

Foraying briefly down to Furnace Creek, with its minus 190’ elevation and triple-digit temperatures, we saw fields of faded flowers and stayed just long enough to track down one interesting bird.

Lucy’s Warbler (Leiothylpis luciae), a dainty resident of desert oases including the Furnace Creek golf course, singing its dawn song:

We then decamped to the high desert (4,500’+) along the east face of the Sierra Nevada, where temperatures were warm but not excessive and birds and flowers were abundant.

The Alabama Hills (foreground, with Sierras in background) are so scenically dramatic that they appear in hundreds of movies and TV shows – mainly old Westerns, plus some extraterrestrial and “Himalayan” epics:

Black-throated Sparrows (Amphispiza bilineata) were abundant in the sagebrush:

White-throated Swifts (Aeronautes saxatilis), a.k.a. avian jet pilots, zoomed above the canyons leading up to the high Sierras:

Scarlet Milkvetch (Astragalus coccineus) grew abundantly on decomposed granite:

Sandblossoms (Linanthus parryae), which come in blue and white, were the focus of a classic controversy in evolutionary theory you can read about here and here:

LeConte’s Thrasher (Toxostoma lecontei), another uncommon desert bird, eluded us in the Alabama Hills.  Farther north near Bishop, California, it was a delight to find this one and its mate apparently feeding large black insects to well-hidden nestlings:

Very fortunately for me, my next work duty after our desert vacation was a speaking engagement in Tucson, and the heat wave finally ended midway through that visit.  Here are some photos from two lovely days of birding in southern Arizona.

Curve-billed Thrasher (Toxostoma curvirostre):

Painted Redstart (Myioborus pictus):

Rivoli’s Hummingbird (Eugenes fulgens):

Bridled Titmouse (Baeolophus wollweberi):

Red-naped Sapsucker (Sphyrapicus nuchalis):

Scott’s Oriole (Icterus parisorum):