Category: mammals

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 15, 2026 • 8:15 am

Ecologist Susan Harrison has stepped up to the plate with some bird photos (and a herd of mammals), ensuring that we have wildlife photos today. But this is the last batch I have; will you help us tomorrow and thereafter?

Sisan’s text and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.

Some winter birds, and one herd of ungulates, in California and Oregon

It’s been a quiet winter for me aside from a previously WEIT-recorded trip to Belize, and so it’s taken a few months to accumulate a handful of photos that seemed at least a little bit striking – either because of the sheer beauty of the animal or because of the behavior it was displaying.

The first three photos are from an Ashland, Oregon streamside. It was especially intriguing to see a pair, or perhaps adult and offspring, of American Dippers (Cinclus mexicanus) eating very large tubular items that turned out to be nymphal October Caddisflies (Dicosmoecus gilvipes).   This insect is an key menu item for fish at a food-sparse time of year, and thus is well known to Western US anglers, but it was new to me.

American Dippers:

Near the Dippers were the showiest bird in town, the male Wood Duck (Aix sponsa), and the bird with the biggest voice despite its tiny size, the Pacific Wren (Troglodytes pacificus).

Wood Duck:

Pacific Wren:

The next three photos were from a winter raptor-watching trip to the Klamath Basin of southern Oregon and northeastern California.  Watch closely for the non-birds 😊

Ferruginous Hawk (Buteo regalis) in front of Mt. Shasta:

Pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) crossing a stretch of farmland:

Great Gray Owl (Strix nebulosa) lurking beside a meadow at dusk:

The following are birds foraging in the parks and neighborhoods around Ashland.

Cedar Waxwings (Bombycilla cedrorum):

Hermit Thrush (Catharus guttatus):

Acorn Woodpeckers (Melanerpes formicivorus):

Lesser Goldfinch (Spinus psaltria):

Spotted Towhee (Pipilio maculatus):

The last three shots are from the seaside or bayside in Northern California.

Black Oystercatcher (Haematopus bachmani) prying up barnacles:

American White Pelicans (Pelecanus erythrorhynchus):

Black Skimmers (Rhynchops niger).

Black Skimmers are most unusual birds that hunt in large flocks by dangling their huge lower mandible into the water while flying at high speed.  They mostly inhabit much warmer climes, and I was surprised to learn of this flock in the southern San Francisco Bay.   Per AllAboutBirds, they have been described as looking “unworldly… aerial beagles hot on the scent of aerial rabbits.”:

Readers’ wildlife photos

February 14, 2026 • 8:30 am

These are the last photos I have, and I’ve gathered singletons in a potpourri of photos. Please send me any good wildlife photos you have—otherwise there will be a LACUNA tomorrow. Captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

From Pratyaydipta Rudra in Oklahoma.

This is a Pine Squirrel [Tamiascirus sp.], photographed in Rocky Mountain National Park, CO.

From Adrian:

Here’s a picture of a European Pine Marten (Martes martes) from the shores of Loch Duich, near the Isle of Skye, Scotland:

From Guy:

Taken in Lake Saint Clair Metropark in Michigan a few years back by my 12 year old son Nolan at a bird-banding station where we volunteer. I think it’s a Blackpoll Warbler (Setophaga striata) with the image taken in the fall (so I don’t really know if it’s male or female):

From Robert Lang, whose house and studio burned to the ground during the California fires last year; both are being rebuilt:

Our gardener found this California native tarantula (Aphonopelma sp.) while clearing some fire debris at my former studio and, knowing that my wife had a pet tarantula and was helping the Eaton Canyon Nature Center in its fire recovery, he left it for us at our temporary home in a little plastic bottle. (Umm…the tarantula was in a little plastic bottle. Not our home.) After we determined that ECNC didn’t have a place for one yet, we released it locally, but I took this picture before it wandered away.
When we got home from the release, there was another plastic bottle on the porch with another tarantula inside.

A Hummingbird Moth (species unknown) from Marty Riddle:

The Hawk Moths, aka Hummingbird Moth, love the nectar in resident maintained gardens at Brooksby Village Peabody, Massachusetts:

And a cat/bird encounter from Barry Lyons:

For years now, I’ve had mourning doves  [Zenaida macroura] alight on my air conditioner. Some of them are regulars, and what interests me is that they haven’t taken the next obvious step: pecking at the window.
What I mean is that a dove arrives and then stares into my apartment, sometimes moving its head back and forth: “Are you in there? Ah, there you are!” And then I get up from my chair and go feed them.
But when will a dove start pecking at the window to alert me that he’s there? Why hasn’t it figured out that it’s something it can do? And at no cost to his safety because he can still fly away.
And look at this photo. The dove seems to understand windows. Every time a cat goes to the window (I don’t own a cat; I cat-sit) it flares its wings instead of flying off, as if to say, “Ha ha, you can’t get me. I’m out here, you idiot.”

Readers’ wildlife photos: Darwin Day edition

February 12, 2026 • 8:15 am

Today we have a Darwin-themed text-and-photo contribution by Athayde Tonhasca Júnior, and on his favorite topic: pollination (and my favorite topic, speciation). Athayde’s IDs and narrative are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Parting ways

As superlatives go, it would be difficult to beat the South African Platland Baobab [Adansonia digitata]. Its 10.6-m diameter trunk was large enough to accommodate a bar inside its hollow trunk. The massive tree, now deceased, was also old – it had been on this Earth for about a millennia.

There aren’t many places where you can order a pint inside a tree like the Platland or Sunland Baobab © South African Tourism, Wikimedia Commons:

Leaving aside its connection to thirsty pilgrims, the Platland Baobab was not exceptional: other specimens belonging to the same African baobab (Adansonia digitata) species are similarly big and old. The African baobab’s size, age and the somewhat bizarre shape (the ‘upside-down tree’) inspired many legends and superstitions. Beyond the mythical, baobabs have practical uses to some rural communities in parts of Africa: fruits and leaves are rich in vitamin C, the bark can be used for making rope, and tree hollows serve as water reservoirs. Wildlife also feed on baobab’s parts, sometimes in excess: elephants eat baobab bark during the dry season, resulting in significant tree mortality when elephant numbers are high.

One African titan squaring up to another © Ferdinand Reus, Wikimedia Commons:

Like the vast majority of flowering plants, the African baobab is a hermaphrodite:  its flowers have male and female reproductive organs. And like most hermaphrodite plants, baobab flowers are self-incompatible; they can’t fertilise themselves. Therefore, pollinators have to come to their reproductive aid. That’s particularly important for African baobabs, which often grow in isolation, with an average of 2 trees/ha.

When researchers started investigating baobab reproduction in West and East Africa in the 1930s and 40s, bats were soon singled out as their likely pollinating agents. It made sense: the white, large (up to 200 mm in diameter) pendulous flowers open at night and release a musty smell, all signs of chiropterophily, or pollination by bats. But things are a bit more complex. Flowers in west and east Africa are mostly visited by the straw-coloured fruit bat Eidolon helvum (Eidolon helvum) and the smaller Egyptian fruit bat (Rousettus aegyptiacus), respectively. However in southern Africa, baobab flowers have no appeal to bats, but do attract hawk-moths. These regional differences are linked to floral features such as shape, scent and nectar volume. In west Africa, flowers are larger, have longer peduncles, longer styles and more nectar than flowers in east and southern Africa. East African flowers are smaller and sturdier, with less nectar but enough to encourage visits by the Egyptian fruit bat. Flowers in southern Africa are smaller still and produce nectar in volumes just enough for moths (Venter et al., 2025).  And while baobabs flowers from the three regions release bat-attracting sulphur compounds, southern African flowers also produce β-caryophyllene, a chemical known to lure moths (Karimi et al., 2021).

Below:  A) A straw-coloured fruit bat in west Africa feeding on a baobab flower while a hawk-moth thieves, that is, it takes nectar but does not pollinate. B): an Egyptian fruit bat in east Africa landing briefly to lick nectar. C:) a long-tongued and a short-tongued hawk-moths feeding in southern Africa © Venter et al., 2025:

The African baobab is by no means unique; many other species comprise populations of diversified floral traits that suit particular pollinators and local environmental conditions. Ecologists refer to each of these populations as pollination ecotypes, species complexes, geographical races or ecological races. Pollination ecotypes have one possible outcome of exceptional importance: given enough time, they may drift further apart in their morphological and physiological traits to the point of becoming reproductively incompatible with each other.

Examples of pollination ecotypes. Long-spurred Platanthera bifolia pollinated by the hawk-moth Sphinx ligustri (a) and a shorter-spurred form pollinated by the hawk-moth Hyloicus pinastri (b); short-tubed Gladiolus longicollis pollinated by hawk-moths with short probosces (c) and a long-tubed form pollinated by hawk-moths with long probosces (d). © Johnson, 2025:

It’s worth emphasising the meaning of such an outcome. Different forms – or morphs – in each ecotype associated with their own pollinators will eventually become different species, a process that has become widely acknowledged (Johnson, 2025). Speciation via ecotypes supports Darwin’s view that species and infraspecies taxa (varieties, subspecies, forms, morphs, etc.) represent a continuum: In short, we shall have to treat species in the same manner as those naturalists treat genera, who admit that genera are merely artificial combinations made for convenience. This may not be a cheering prospect; but we shall at least be freed from the vain search for the undiscovered and undiscoverable essence of the term species (Darwin, 1859). Such a continuum implies that speciation is much more common and frequent than one may expect (Mallet, 2008).

The roles of insect pollinators as safeguards of biodiversity, crop production and human health are well known and celebrated. But the tale of African baobab pollination ecotypes reminds us of another fundamental aspect: pollinators greatly contribute to the radiation and diversification of angiosperms, the largest and most diverse group in the plant kingdom and largely responsible for the functioning of all terrestrial ecosystems. It’s a hefty responsibility upon tiny shoulders.

Accumulated diversification of insect families through time. Dotted lines indicate the Permian–Triassic (P–T), Triassic–Jurassic (T–J), and the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) mass extinctions © Peris & Condamine, 2024:

References

Darwin, C.R. 1859. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. John Murray.
Johnson, S.D. 2025. Pollination ecotypes and the origin of plant species. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 292: 20242787.
Karimi, N. et al. 2021. Evidence for hawkmoth pollination in the chiropterophilous African baobab (Adansonia digitata). Biotropica 54: 10.1111/btp.13033.
Mallet, J. 2008. Hybridization, ecological races and the nature of species: Empirical evidence for the ease of speciation. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B 363: 2971-2986.
Peris, D. & Condamine, F.L. 2024. The angiosperm radiation played a dual role in the diversification of insects and insect pollinators. Nature Communications 15: 552.
Venter, S.M. et al. 2025. Regional flower visitor assemblages and divergence of floral traits of the baobab Adansonia digitata (Malvaceae) across Africa. Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society boaf085.

Readers’ wildlife photos and video

February 9, 2026 • 8:30 am

Posting will be light today as I have three meetings/events to attend. I am supposed to be retired!

Those of you with photos please send them along, as I have about three more batches before Armageddon hits. Thank you!

Today we have the second batch of photos from Sri Lanka contributed by reader MichaelC—and one video (his earlier batch on the flora is here).  Michael’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Sri Lankan Fauna! 

Unlike the orchids and Angel’s Trumpets, which kindly stayed still for me, most of the animals did not. So few of my critter photos are well focused. Even so, some are interesting.

An Indian Elephant (Elephas maximus indicus) snorkeling its way across a lake! Right behind this fella were two cows and a young one, also snorkeling:

Here’s the big fella coming out of the lake….:

….to join a herd of some thirty other elephants. We were in an open vehicle on a tour of Wasgamuwa National Park. This is a close up showing a newborn calf. There were a number of Sri Lankan biologists there in other vehicles documenting the little one, which they said was only four days old:

These are all wild elephants who are accustomed to gawking tourists. Nevertheless, our guides were very stern about never leaving the vehicle. Elephants tolerate people, but they don’t like us. That’s by design. Sri Lankans value their elephants and don’t want to cull them in order to keep them from destroying crops. They do not kill elephants unless they become a threat to people. So farmers use what are essentially paint ball guns to shoot them. Stings like hell, but does no harm. The elephants learn to avoid people, but the process makes them cranky and unpredictable. Indeed, my soon-to-be-wife and I (and a bunch of other guests) were chased off a dinner set up on a beach in Yala National Park by a cranky bull elephant. The resort had “spotters” positioned around the resort watching for elephants. A familiar, bad-tempered bull decided he didn’t want any humans on his beach, so the spotters came running. 

This is a Brahminy Kite (Haliastur indus). They follow the herds and gobble up things they stir from the grass.

Two Many-lined Sun Skinks (Eutropis multifasciata) caught in flagrante delicto:

A Sri Lankan Wild Boar (Sus scrofa cristatus), a subspecies of the Indian Wild Boar (Sus scrofa):

Some sort of Agama, maybe the Ground Agama (Agama aculeata)?:

Chital or Sri Lankan Spotted deer (Axis axis ceylonensis):

A Snowy Egret (Egretta thula) going for a ride on a Water Buffalo (Bubalis bubalis):

A Red-wattled Lapwing (Vanellus indicus) standing in her nest:

Asian Green Bee-eater (Merops orientalis) the birds are welcome visitors to Sri Lankan, migrating in from India (I suppose) part of the year. They are very pretty and have a wonderfully beautiful song:

A Little Egret (Egretta garzetta) with a disappointed Mugger Crocodile (Crocodylus palustris). This was the last in a series of shots of the two. The croc tried to sneak up on the egret, but the bird saw him the whole time. It was hilarious because the croc thought it was being so stealthy but the bird just carried on fishing and was like; “dude, you know I can see you, right?”.:

Common Green Forest Lizard (Calotes calotes) displaying mating green:

These Hanuman langurs (Semnopithecus sp.?) are notorious thieves. But this guy was part of a small troop who completely ignored us:

Bengal monitor (Varanus bengalensis). This guy was more than a meter long!:

Lagniappe! A short video of immature bull elephants working out the pecking order. Or maybe just showing off. The young males spent a lot of time jousting like this. Surely it must be important behavior because otherwise, instead of spending their time and energy doing this, they could be eating and growing:

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

February 7, 2026 • 8:30 am

Today we have urban wildlife, from Marcel van Oijen in Edinburgh.  His notes are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Urban wildlife in Scotland: Vertebrates

Marcel van Oijen

 

We live in Edinburgh South and our back garden borders a small woodland. The following pictures were all taken in the garden over a number of years, but I sorted them by month, from January to November.

Foxes (Vulpes vulpes) are among the first visitors to our garden each year. They have become very common in British cities. There are about 400,000 foxes in the U.K., and roughly one third are city-dwellers.

Magpies (Pica pica) come in droves to our garden. They are fascinating to watch but tend to frighten off the songbirds and steal their food:

Occasionally we see sparrowhawks (Accipiter nisus) plucking pigeons apart until what is left is small enough to fly away with. The magpies resent the sparrowhawks invading their territory, and gang up against them:

Carrion crows (Corvus corone) usually come in pairs; this one was an exception. The way it walked, paused, looked around, nodded its head, inspecting everything – it all suggested confidence and cleverness:

We do not often see Great Spotted Woodpeckers (Dendrocopos major), but regularly hear them pecking away when walking in the woodland behind the garden:

The mammals we see the most are our American friends, the Grey Squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis). They tend to chase ach other away, but these two were friendly, maybe young siblings:

We are always surprised to see amphibians because there is not much open water in our neighbourhood. This summer visitor is a Common Frog (Rana temporaria):

Wood mice (Apodemus sylvaticus) are almost as acrobatic as the squirrels, and we see them climbing up the stems of plants and jumping onto the birdfeeders:

We don’t see hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus) often enough – we would like them to eat more of the slugs that invade our house from the garden:

This is the more common behaviour of the Grey Squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis): entering supposedly squirrel-proof birdfeeders and being nasty to each other:

We often see pheasants (Phasianus colchicus) around the golf course one kilometer away, but last November was the first time one came to see us: