Category: photography

Tuesday duck report

August 18, 2026 • 8:30 am

Allow me once again to enchant/bore you with photos of my babies. The ducklings were one month old on Saturday, but they entered the pond the next day, so their official “monthiversay” as pond denizens was Sunday. They’re in their second month now, and are rapidly growing feathers and longer wings. By the end of another month, they’ll be on the verge of flying.

First, some photos and then two short videos. (Click the photos to enlarge them.)

Miss Duck continues to be a terrific mother, always in attendance with the brood. Here she is overlooking them last Friday as they rested after “Second Lunch” (they get fed three times a day). They’re now too large to all fit atop the Sacred Rock that you can barely see peeking over the pond edge in the middle, and so they must rest on the edge itself.  They are now large enough to leap up to the edge.

Note the feathers; they are looking like miniature ducks:

The family resting yesterday on the west side of Botany Pond. The “babies” are together and Miss Duck, of course, is nearby.

Below: a close-up of three babies, who get more and more feathered each day. I’m now told that you can sex the babies with fair accuracy by looking at their bills. If they have yellowish-orange corners, they are supposedly female, while black or brown corners denote males. According to that lore, the duckling on the right is a female, and the two others drakes.

In the photo just above (click to enlarge it), there appear to be two hens and two drakes, with the two hens being the middle two babies. A nicely sex-balanced brood.

And, just to remind you, here they are just a month before, at two days old. How they’ve grown! I needn’t add how much joy these changes bring to me; though they lose their cuteness, they become functioning ducks who can fly off and see the world.

And let’s have a hand for Miss Duck, Mallard Mother of the Year.  Here’s a closeup from the group sitting above. Note that the distal corners of her bill are orange. The dark color of the bill, with an orangish tip, will be a diagnostic phenotype I’ll look for next year when hens return to the pond. She also is more grayish than most hens, which usually have a brown cast.

This is Honey the Duck from 2023, looking more brown (and also more spherical):

The video below was taken last Sunday after Second Lunch. Although the ducks are usually full then and head to the south island for a postprandial rest, they are often a bit frisky for a short period and dunk, swim underwater, and zoom in the water. Here the whole family, including Miss Duck, gets the zoomies, apparently set off by Miss Duck taking flight at the beginning.  Then the babies zoom after her and, when she flies back, zoom in her new direction.

Their little legs and feet must be paddling furiously when they go this fast; I’d love to have an underwater video of these zoomies. Note 12 seconds in when two ducklings flap their stubby little wings. Little do they know that those stubs will soon be carrying them up to the sky!

This short video shows Miss Duck pecking at both a turtle (1 second in) and then a fish (11 seconds in) at feeding time. Neither species poses a threat to her or her babies, but I guess in nature some turtles (like snappers) and some fish are dangerous to the brood. Miss Duck, not knowing the difference, is, I think, following her evolutionary imperative and simply driving away anything of a size that could have been dangerous over evolutionary time.

And a screenshot from the PondCam showing visitors admiring the turtles on the north island and the duck family arrayed on the east side of the Pond. Be sure to watch the PondCam from time to time; you might even see me at feeding time (6:30 a.m., 10:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. or thereabouts, all Chicago time) giving the ducks their comestibles.

Reader’s wildlife photos

August 17, 2026 • 8:15 am

For this edition we include the Sun and Moon as wildlife, as Jan Malik reports on the solar eclipse of April, 2024. Jan’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.  Oh, and Google “solar eclipse 2024” and see what you get!

The recent total solar eclipse in Europe reminded me of the Great North American Eclipse of April 8, 2024, which I had the opportunity to observe from the Adirondack Mountains of New York.

After spending the night in the back of my truck, I set off early in the morning toward the summit of Whiteface Mountain. This being early April, the roads and trails were still snowbound, which allowed for decent skiing. Whiteface Mountain, like Mt. Washington in New Hampshire, features a scenic toll road open in the summer. In winter, this path converts into a gentle, 5-mile cross-country ski course, safe even for bungling skiers like myself. I met another skier on my way up; our goal for the day was to reach the summit before 1 p.m., when the eclipse was about to begin:

The area was still quite snowy, and the summit observatory building was plastered solidly with snow:

In the summer, Whiteface Mountain is a tourist attraction and one of the few places in the USA where you can see the metric system at work:

The toll road winds up the mountain at a steady 8-degree incline. If you look closely, you can spot three hikers making their way up. Our main concern for the day was to pick an outlook with a clear view of the sky. Adirondack weather is notoriously unpredictable, but we were lucky that day, with only some wispy clouds in the sky:

As predicted, at about 1 p.m. we could see the Moon bite off a small piece of the Sun. All observations of the Sun must be done through a dark solar filter, except during totality. The filter I had bought was not of very high quality; it had an orange cast and severe dispersion issues:

After about half an hour, little remained of the Sun in my viewfinder:

Even with 99% of the Sun covered, it was still bright outside, but the light had an unusual, unsettling quality—quite subdued, but with a color temperature equal to normal daylight. Normally, we experience diminished light only at sunset or sunrise, when the color temperature shifts toward red, but here it happened almost at high noon. The picture doesn’t fully convey that experience; you have to see it to understand the strangeness of the moment:

Then it happened. Seemingly within a single second, the light went out, as if someone had flipped a giant switch, and what we saw above our heads no longer resembled our familiar day star. That was the only time we could observe the Sun with the naked eye. It is not a sensation easily described by words, but I—and I am sure everyone else—was stunned and overwhelmed by this transition from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde. If you look closely, there are a few solar prominences visible in the lower half of the Sun’s disk, each of them larger than the Earth’s diameter:

Totality in this part of the Adirondacks lasted a full 3 minutes and 20 seconds, and that time passed quickly. Everyone was absorbed in the moment, trying to capture as much of it as possible, both in memory and on their devices. It became noticeably colder, and the only non-human animal present—a pet dog—started barking, unable to comprehend why the world had changed so abruptly:

We were in the so-called umbra (totality), but in the distance we could clearly see the distant horizon glowing where the shadow ended, marking the transition back to partial daylight:

The Sun high above frozen Lake Placid:

I was not prepared for the momentary shock of transitioning from the commonplace to the unworldly and let my photographic guard down, missing the “diamond ring” effect, where the Sun begins to shine again from behind the Moon’s cover. But some moments in life should be savored by observing rather than documenting:

The “diamond ring” lasts only a second or two, and after that, the switch is turned back on and the light reappears. The thermal death of the universe having been averted, it is back to using the filter to protect both eyesight and the camera:

As a bonus picture, here is the entire sequence of the Moon passing in front of the Sun’s surface over 2 hours. The colors are a bit uneven due to an unfortunate choice of camera settings—live and learn. The black specks are sunspots:

At the beginning of that day, I was curious if the hype surrounding the eclipse was somewhat inflated by the tourism lobby or if it was something truly worth seeing. In the afternoon, skiing down the toll road while trying to control my emotions, I knew that it was a mind-altering event that everyone should experience once in their life. I was lucky that it happened in my Adirondack backyard, with hassle-free access and familiar surroundings, but I would now travel far just to see one. The next eclipse, with an exceptionally long totality of more than 6 minutes, will occur over North Africa, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia on August 2, 2027. People will be streaming in by the hundreds of thousands to see it, but crowds or not, I promise you will not regret it. Now is a good time to start making travel arrangements.

Readers’ wildlife photos

August 14, 2026 • 8:15 am

In light of the absence of reader contribution, but delighted to show such lovely photos, I present some of Dr. Scott Ritchie‘s photos from last October (his FB page is here). Note that the photos include NUMBATS (Myrmecobius fasciatus), which are endangered. Scott hails from Cairns in Australia.

Scott’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Some really cute mammals from Dryandra, SE of Perth. The forest area is home to the critically endangered Numbat. I was really pleased to see this cute little fella, and get some decent pics. And here are a few birds from the area too.

Looking for his brother. He caught a bit of golden light before sunset.

Oh, there he is!

Hop to it!

Standing tall:

A Tassie tiger look, love it!:

A Varied Sittella (Daphoenositta chrysoptera) hops along a gum branch:

The Rufous Treecreeper (Climacteris rufus). This guy always seemed to be puffed up:

Here he goes again:

A Painted Buttonquail (Turnix varius), I think:

The Australian Ringneck (Barnardius zonarius; western subspecies):

Yellow-plumed Honeyeater (Ptilotula ornata) with flower frill:
Carnaby’s Black Cockatoo (Zanda latirostris):

Readers’ wildlife photos

August 13, 2026 • 8:30 am

Please send in wildlife ph0tos if you have some good ones.  This feature has become pretty intermittent.

Today’s wildlife photos come from reader Jan Malik, who sent bird photos taken in Poland. Jan’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

In July, I had an opportunity to hike in the northern, Polish section of the Tatra Mountains. This part of this alpine range is probably less biodiverse than the substantially larger Slovak part, where a large portion of the slopes are south-facing. Still, I saw a few animals—both vertebrates and invertebrates—that were new to me.

A sample of the habitat at the entrance to a valley in the limestone Western Tatras:

Just as I stopped by this creek to eat my breakfast on the go, a bird appeared, forcing me to postpone consumption and switch to photography mode. The bird was a male Grey wagtail (Motacilla cinerea), which in its breeding plumage is actually bright yellow. He was hopping lively on the cliff, collecting arthropods to feed his chicks. The white, woolly-looking flower by the wagtail is the emblematic Edelweiss (Leontopodium nivale), a hallmark of limestone alpine mountains (it grows only on basic substrates). The flower’s woolly appearance may be an adaptation to low temperatures and intense ultraviolet radiation:

The wagtail disappeared for a moment and then returned, having fed his chicks. Its flight is highly undulated, and when resting it, well, wags its tail vigorously:

Another successful hunting run finished, and the wagtail is ready to return to his nest with a beak full of insects. Judging by their opaque wings and long antennae, these are caddisflies (order Trichoptera):

The wagtail left, and just as I was going to resume my hike, another bird landed on the same spot—a good lookout in the middle of the creek. This was a White-throated dipper (Cinclus cinclus), a close relative of our American dipper, which I had once searched for in vain in the American Southwest (Zion National Park and the like). This genus is unique among songbirds in that it is mostly aquatic when feeding. It nests close to the banks of fast-flowing streams and forages by wading and diving underwater in search of arthropods, sometimes using its wings for underwater propulsion if the current gets too strong. I think in this picture the bird holds a caddisfly larva (stripped of its protective debris case) and possibly a couple of adult caddisflies.

Dipper females and males are monomorphic, and both sexes sport a white bib, which their American cousins lack:

Apart from a nearly identical body structure, what they have in common with our American dipper (or, as some say, the water ouzel) is a white upper eyelid, visible when the bird blinks. Unlike wagtails, they fly in a dead straight line, patrolling and defending their stretches of waterways:

For the next 20 minutes I watched the bird collect food above and under water, but capturing its underwater feeding was harder than I thought, with the bird being restless and the autofocus being thrown off by the turbulent water. They usually start nesting as soon as the water is free of ice, which in this location can be mid-April. If they are still nesting in July, it may mean they are raising a second brood:

They are called “dippers” because of their habit of bowing and bobbing. While they are songbirds, I didn’t hear any calls, but I read they do call and sing, like any songbirds. It is reasonable to assume that, since they live in the fairly noisy environments of fast mountain creeks, they communicate visually via displays like wing-quivering. It was a real treat to see these birds in action, especially in the crowded environment of Tatra National Park, which sees more than 5 million visitors annually. To put it in perspective, that is more visitors, in a much smaller area, than Yellowstone National Park receives. During my 30-minute impromptu birding session, an incessant stream of people kept streaming into the valley right behind my back, but the birds were completely habituated to the human presence:

After ascending for a while, I reached the krummholz and alpine meadow zone. A notable distinction between this and a similar zone in the Adirondacks of NY or the White Mountains of NH was the presence of a specialized high-altitude dwarf mountain pine (Pinus mugo), forming dense thickets. In the US, these zones feature dwarf, bonsai-like variations of spruce and balsam fir from the boreal forest zone:

I noticed a little commotion in the dwarf pine thicket; it was a fledgling following its parent, begging to be fed:

After a while, the adult bird appeared. It was, I believe, a Black redstart female (Phoenicurus ochruros); the “black” part comes from the male’s coloration. They nest in rocky areas across Eurasia;

Comparing the Tatra Mountains to mountain ranges in the US Northeast, it is surprising that, even though the Tatras are about 5 degrees closer to the North Pole and higher (I believe the last three pictures were taken almost at 6,000 feet altitude), they are more biodiverse.

Readers’ wildlife photos

August 10, 2026 • 8:15 am

Stalwart regular and crack arthopod photographer Mark Sturtevant has sent us photos of spiders, lepidopterans, and assorted insects. His captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

The various arthropods shown here were all photographed from my area in eastern Michigan. Most were taken in the field, but a couple were staged shots. Let’s begin with spiders.

The first is a new species for me. This is the Butterfly Orbweaver, Araneus pegnia. The name comes from the white four-lobed marking on the abdomen. Although very stretched in this gravid female, in thinner individuals it does look like a four-winged butterfly.

Next up is my highly reliable always-there-for-me-in-case-I-need-it jumping spider, usually called the Tan Jumping Spider (Platycryptus undatus). They are common on our shed, but lately they are also turning up on our front and back porches. This is perhaps because I often leave the porch lights on these days to draw in nocturnal insects. This adorable male was photographed as a manual focus stack on the dining room table. You can see the reflection of my home-made flash diffuser in the eyes, along with the black outline of the lens. As usual, I forgot to remove the clamp of the Raynox diopter lens that is used to boost magnification, and so you can see that too in the reflection.

A small obsession with me lately is shown with the next spider. This is the Candy-striped Spider, Enoplognatha ovata, and she has the remains of a small Hemipteran on a daisy flower where she was hanging out. Candy-striped Spiders are in the family of cobweb-weaving spiders (which includes our common house spiders and widows), but this species lives our in the sunshine, and is commonly seen lurking just under the flowers of herbaceous plants. One item of notoriety about them is that they prowl around their plants at night, looking for sleeping insects which then never wake up. So, I regularly scour our gardens to keep track of the known spiders to see what they have been up to. They almost always have prey on hand, and after a good night they may have several insects with them. I call these collections “a little shop of horrors”, inspired by their nocturnal habit of dining out.

The last of the spiders is a Hammock Spider, Pityohyphantes costatus. They build untidy hammock-like webs on plants in forests, and they too seem to do quite well. This one got a Long-legged Fly (Dolichopodidae), which are super alert flies with very fast reflexes as any macrophotographer will know:

That will be all for spiders. Next up are Odonates. This little damselfly is the Eastern Forktail (Ischnura verticalis). I really need to get more damselfly pictures since there are so many species that I have never photographed. A long focal length macro lens would help immensely!

The next Odonate is one of my favorites. This is the Calico Pennant Dragonfly (Celithemis elisa). Mature males like this one are stunningly colored with deep reds, while the similar females have yellow coloration:

A place that I call the Magic Field has a very dense population of grasshoppers. One of my favorite species commonly seen out there are the Carolina Grasshoppers (Dissosteira carolina), But surely everyone in the U.S. and parts of Canada are familiar with them. Adults have boldly contrasting black and yellow hind wings, as shown in the linked picture, but with wings folded at rest they are well camouflaged. The grasshoppers are divided about evenly into two color morphs, and these are shown here as nymphs that were picked up in the Magic Field for staged pictures on the dining room table. The combined picture is a bit of post-processing trickery since they were photographed separately:

The next picture is a katydid that was also found in the Magic Field. This is a nymph of the Fork-tailed Bush Katydid (Scudderia furcate). It was systematically cleaning all 6 feet without any concern about my proximity:

The little planthopper in the next picture was pulled in from the porch lights mentioned above. This is Tylozygus bifidus:

Lets’ wrap this up with Lepidopterans. It is always a special day to find the caterpillars of giant silk moths, but the species that seems almost common are Promethea Moth caterpillars (Callosamia promethea). These grow into beautiful pastel colored caterpillars the size of large pickles, and later into a palm-sized moth like the one shown in the link. But for now, these youngsters were the size of rice grains. The younger caterpillars tend to stay together through their early instars. It was neat that they had even molted together.

The swarm of recently hatched caterpillars in the next picture were found on a swamp milkweed leaf, so they should be Milkweed Tussock Moth caterpillars (Euchaetes egle). These don’t look like much now, but later they grow into flamboyantly furry caterpillars.

Lastly, we have our largest butterfly, the Giant Swallowtail (Papilio cresphontes). I was following it for some time, taking pictures, and here it was nicely photo-bombed by a Common Eastern Bumblebee (Bombus impatiens):

Readers’ wildlife photos

August 9, 2026 • 8:15 am

Glory be—a few regulars have sent in some lovely wildlife photos, so I can post some critters today. These intertidal critters come from UC Davis math professor Abby Thompson, who does great marine photography on the California coast. Abby’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.

These are probably the last of the summer tidepool photos.  The (spectacular!) final nudibranch is one that I’ve only found once up here before- it’s usually a slightly more southerly species.  If the El Niño comes through as predicted, we should see more this coming year.

The first four animals are chitons, the roly-poly’s of the ocean.     They have a common structure- 8 shell plates, surrounded by a mantle.   The structure of the mantle and the sculpturing on the shell plates, (sometimes) allows identification to species.     The Mopalia (this seems to be a made-up word) chitons have some kind of hairs or feathery things on the mantle.  The type/quantity/form of the hairs can be distinctive.    The first three creatures are in this genus.

Mopalia lionata:

Mopalia lionata: close-up of the feathers on the mantle:

Mopalia spectabilis (tentative ID):

Mopalia spectabilis: close-up of the stripes/hairs on the mantle:

Genus Mopalia – I can’t tell the genus, but liked the photo:

The Lepidozona chitons have small overlapping scales on the mantle and beautiful sculpturing of the shell plates:

Lepidozona cooperi:

Lepidozona cooperi- close-up of the mantle:

Lepidozona cooperi- close-up of the sculpturing:

Diodora aspera (Rough keyhole limpet):

Genus Paranamertes (ribbon worm): There’s a specific local species called a “purple ribbon worm”, and one might think this one would qualify, but it turns out (thanks inaturalist experts!) that identifying to species is tricky in this genus:

Finishing up with some nudibranchs. . .

Corambe steinbergae – chomping on its favorite bryozoan prey, on which it is virtually invisible:

Diaphoreolis lagunae – Laguna Beach aeolid:

And the gorgeous:

Certat0d0ris rosacea: Hopkin’s Rose. Wouldn’t you love to know the sequence of adaptations that led to this?:

Stripes on the beach, early in the morning. It looked as though someone had ruled paths for the water to flow down the beach:

Sunset over Tomales Point:

Readers’ wildlife photos

August 5, 2026 • 8:15 am

We have only a few batches left, and I am baffled about why few submissions are coming in. Please, if you have photos and appreciate this site, send me some good ones. Thanks!

Today’s photos come from Marcel van Oijen in the Netherlands. His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

A Dutch Garden in Summertime

Marcel van Oijen

This summer we spent two weeks in the Netherlands, looking after the house of Nellie and Roel who count as both family and close friends. The following nine pictures were taken in their garden in the small town of Woudenberg, in the central Dutch province of Utrecht. Even though the Netherlands are just 700 km away from us (we live in Scotland on the opposite side of the North Sea), temperatures were about ten degrees higher there which made for much more varied wildlife.

This is a Willow Emerald damselfly (Chalcolestes viridis), recognisable from its brownish eyes. We never see damselflies or dragonflies in our garden here, so this was a huge and pleasant surprise:

Small White butterfly (Pieris rapae). Very common on both sides of the pond:

Vagrant Darter dragonfly (Sympetrum vulgatum). The species can be identified from its yellow-black legs, and its overall yellow colour tells us it’s a female;

Red Admiral (Vanessa atalanta). A very common butterfly also here in Scotland:

Another Pieris butterfly, a Green-veined White (Pieris napi). I find the various Whites often difficult to photograph because they are so restless, but here they took their time feeding, maybe because the heat was too much even for them, or the flowers contained more nectar than usual?:

This European Garden Spider (Araneus diadematus) was a joy to follow during our days in the garden, when it was making or repairing its web, or scurrying toward the foliage whenever I got too close. Here it is wrapping up some prey (a hoverfly perhaps) for dinner later.

The sky was not really this featureless white, but I overexposed this picture of a Blue Tit (Cyanistes caeruleus) by two stops to make the picture look somewhat like a Chinese print:

And here is its larger cousin, a Great Tit (Parus major), with tiny prey:

We finish with one of the most common hoverflies in Europe, a Marmalade Hoverfly (Episyrphus balteatus). This photo was taken while sitting at the breakfast table in the garden, where they would be hovering near the same flowers every morning, so I could focus the camera first and then simply wait for one of them to appear in the right spot: