Category: readers’ videos

Duck report!!!

March 24, 2026 • 8:30 am

It’s time for a duck report.  Things have been erratic, duckwise, over the last couple of weeks, with the weather going nuts. On some days it’s been 70°F (21°C), on others it’s been below freezing, with snow or driving rain.  Through it all the ducks have been here, though in the last week or so Vashti makes only sporadic appearances.

Usually Vashti (the hen) has been absent in the mornings, leaving Armon (the drake) to sit disconsolately on the rocks, staring into space. It’s clear he wants to be with his boo, and only Ceiling Cat knows where she goes.  I suspect she’s building a nest somewhere and perhaps laying eggs (1 per day until they’re all laid).  But she can’t be incubating eggs yet, as she returns in the afternoon for hours, much to the delight of Armon, who begins eating again. This is a true duck romance.

It’s a bit early to incubate eggs, as the weather in April may be cold and rainy for ducklings. But I can’t control wild birds.

The breeding goes like this. First, Vashti will build a nest. They’ve almost always been on the window ledges of the building to the east of Botany Pond (Erman Hall), but I see no nest there, and if she were breeding there Armon would be in the water under the nest. Nor is she nesting under the tree where Esther nested last year. I have no idea where the nest is, and of course I can’t follow her.

As I said, hens lay one egg per day, but don’t start incubation until all the eggs are laid, whereupon she sits tight on the entire clutch, ensuring that all the embryos begin development at the same time and that they will hatch within a day of each other. The incubation period is 28 or 29 days, so when Vashti disappears, I begin the countdown. (I’ve already ordered a big stock of duckling food.)  During incubation she may come to the pond every day or so for a very short period to have a bath and a feed (if I’m lucky enough to see her). But she won’t leave the eggs for very long.

During incubation, wild mallards can lose up to 30% of their body weight as they neither eat nor drink.  Vashti, though, is pampered and can get fed during incubation. My intention is to feed her up so she has plenty of mass and energy to incubate the eggs, and, when she begins incubation, to watch the pond from my office to run down and feed her if she makes a short appearance. This will ensure that when the babies arrive, mom will be in good condition to tend them. That worked well for Esther last year, though she nested on the ground under a tree.

But I’m jumping the gun. Here are some photos and video I took over the last couple of weeks. Since the weather has been miserable, the sunny-day photos were all taken about the middle of March when it was warm.

Here’s a panorama of Botany Pond. Can you spot the pair? The answer is at the bottom.  Erman is the building to the left, and you can see the two pond-watching benches. There is a narrow channel of water behind where I stood to take this photo.

Armon and Vashti having luncheon:

Their main diet is Mazuri Waterfowl Chow, which provides a complete diet for ducks. New ducks usually must learn that what I throw them is what they should eat. (At first they are frightened.) But this pair learned quickly, which made me suspect that they are familiar with Botany Pond and the feeding ritual. Perhaps they were here in previous years, and one or both of them may be the offspring of Esther and Mordecai from last year. I whistle to them at feeding time, and they swim to me when they hear me or see me (they knew this from the outset). This again constitutes evidence that these ducks are familiar with Botany Pond.

Here’s a video of them having noms (Mazuri pellets):

After the pellets they get dessert: freeze-dried mealworms, their favorite. Mealworms are pricey but I don’t stint on them at this stage, since Vashti needs to be fattened up, and mealworms are a good source of protein.

Butt view of the pair swimming away:

Mallards on the rocks (a good name for a drink):

They are a handsome couple, no?

Lately they have actually been coming out of the water to greet me when I call. But I let them go back into the pond before I feed them, as they need to sip water during and between bouts of eating pellets and mealworms:

One day I watched Vashti foraging on the ground after lunch.  I have no idea what she’s finding to eat in all the dirt and mulch, but she was very busy and clearly finding noms. Worms, slugs, whatever:

Here’s a video of Vashti foraging on the ground. Armon is of course nearby (they are never separated by more than a couple of feet when they’re in the water). Armon peeks over the ledge to see that his hen is okay. Notice her full crop!

And, ladies and gentlemen, comrades, brothers and sisters, here is Vasthi in all her mallardly glory. She’s pretty plump, which is how I want her when she starts incubating her eggs:

And we can’t neglect the handsome Armon, all decked out in his breeding plumage:

I will of course keep you updated, though I wish I knew where the nest was!

Finally, here are the ducks in the pond panorama, circled:

Readers’ wildlife video

October 7, 2025 • 8:30 am

Today we have a 3-minute video taken by ecologist Adam Greer and showing fascinating and complex zooplankton.  The video is below, and I asked Adam to provide some additional information on this animal. Adam’s explanations are indented.

I am a zooplankton ecologist at University of Georgia. A major part of my research involves using camera systems to study the distribution and behavior of zooplankton. One zooplankton type we study is the appendicularians, which use mucous houses to feed on ocean microbes. They build and discard these houses several times per day, which can be a mechanism for moving carbon into the deep ocean. I recently put together a short video of this process, with the hope that it could help people see and appreciate that it is happening all over the world’s oceans. Appendicularians are quite fragile, and their houses are very difficult to see unless you use specialized optical techniques (the one we used in the video is called “shadowgraph imaging”).
I thought maybe this could be a variation on the wildlife photos, but obviously you may want to just show actual photos. Still, I think some of your readers might think it is interesting. I did my best to explain what is going on and use kind of informal language so everyone can understand.

The animal builds the (surprisingly intricate) house from a small mucous bubble then uses its tail to draw a current through the house. The water passes through a filter and then the particles get concentrated before being consumed (after going through the buccal tube). This diagram from Bochdansky and Deibel 1999 (below) is pretty helpful. The prey is very small relative to the size of the appendicularian – similar to the predator-prey size ratio of blue whales feeding on krill.

https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0022098198001099-gr2.gif

The video does not go into these mechanics since you cannot really see that amount of detail, but I simply say in the video that they create a current through the house to capture their food. Then it shows the various stages of house building.

And Adam’s video (with music), which is indeed mesmerizing and clearly explained. Stuff like this is going on all the time, but we (or at least I) didn’t know about it.

Readers’ wildlife video

July 20, 2024 • 8:15 am

It must have been a few years since I posted a video by Tara Tanaka; I think she forgot about me! But I saw one of her video posts on FB and reconnected, asking permission to show her wildlife videos from her Florida property (there are several videos, so we have more to come).  This is one of them starring wood storks (Mycteria americana), and here’s her caption:

Last summer at this time the water level in our backyard cypress swamp was about 7′ lower than it is now, and dropping quickly. We had hundreds of Wood Stork nests, and many Great Egret and Anhinga nests as well as those of other wading bird species. We had up to 14 young Roseate Spoonbills visiting on different days in the late spring and early summer. It is rare for the adult storks to feed in our pond – my theory is that they are saving the fish and frogs for their soon to fledge youngsters, since once they begin flying they keep returning to the nest for some time – and having food right in their own backyard makes learning to fish and hunt a lot easier. Last year, however, the water was dropping so fast and there was so much concentrated prey, it’s possible that the adults knew that if they didn’t take advantage of it, the swamp would go dry and the fish would just be wasted. So they did what any intelligent stork would do – they gorged!! This period of time provided the most amazing scenes I’ve ever witnessed in 31 years of living here. It’s taken me a year to finally share it, but I hope you enjoy it!

Be sure to enlarge the video! Most of it save the end is speeded up deliberately, and there’s a great classical-music accompaniment which I, as an ignoramus, don’t recognize.  Thanks to Tara for granting permission to repost her videos (her Vimeo channel is here.)

Readers’ adventure travel

September 28, 2023 • 8:15 am

I’m not getting any new wildlife photos, and while I have a few in reserve, I implore readers to send me their good photos if they want to keep this site going. Here’s an unusual contribution:

In June my friend Andrew Berry, who teaches at Harvard, took a long trek (several guides are is required, along with pricey permits) to Dolpo and the fabled (and previously off-limits) kingdom of Mustang in northern Nepal. Andrew has converted his 3,000 photos, plus some iPhone videos, into a 53-minute account of the trek, which I’ve put below. It was a fantastic journey.

It’s also a trek I always wanted to make. Sadly, now that Mustang has opened up (though only a few tourists still go),  I’m too old to make this arduous trek, though when I hiked around Annapurna I used to stand at the border of the plateau at Jomsom and gaze northwest toward the (then) forbidden kingdom.

Note the dancing starting at 38:45: an authentic folk festival given that Andrew was the only foreigner in town. (It was the monsoon season.)

And if you want to read a brief, illustrated description of the trek, click on the screenshot below. The intro:

June ’23 was pretty open for me — time (yay!) for a visit to Nepal.  Problem: the monsoon arrives in Nepal around the middle of June.  Hiking through the rain isn’t what I had in mind, and it’s also rather self-defeating if you’re interested in seeing anything — the views are mainly, in the monsoon, banks of grey cloud.  But there are parts of Nepal, contra the long-ago Heineken ad, that the monsoon doesn’t reach, namely regions the North of the main range, in the rain shadow of the big peaks.  These transhimalayan regions are politically in Nepal, but are functionally — geographically, linguistically, and culturally — Tibetan.  Hence my trip to Dolpa/Dolpo and Mustang.  Remote country, and regions I’ve long wanted to visit [the first time I became aware of these areas was 41 years ago, during my first visit to Nepal.  I hiked back then to the boundaries of both Dolpa and Mustang, and stared, tantalized, into both.  They were however in those days off limits — foreigners prohibited (partly because of the proximity of the Chinese/TIbetan border).  That’s however changed: these days the Nepalese Govt both restricts access and makes money by charging top dollar for permits].  The virtue of the expense (permits) + low season + remoteness is that these areas are relatively unfrequented by foreigners like me.  In three weeks in the region this summer, I didn’t encounter a single non-Nepali.

I am of course wildly jealous.  If you want to see all of Andrew’s photos, go here. Here’s just one of many:

Readers’ wildlife photos and videos

July 18, 2022 • 8:00 am

Reader Rick Longworth observed a family of robins this year. His photos and videos are below, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them. Rick’s test is indented. Be sure to watch the video!

A pair of American robins (Turdus migratorius ) built a nest in our breezeway this year and they are finally fledging.  At first, I paid little attention as the couple constructed the nest and the 3 eggs were laid. Later the noise of the chicks begging for food caught my attention.  I noticed the nest was very tall and seemed layered, so I thought it might be a new nest built on top of an old one. I know they often have multiple broods in a season.

Father helped with feeding:

 

In the afternoon heat, sometimes above 100°F, the chicks kept their beaks open.

When the chicks were growing too big for the nest, I hoped to film the fledging event and I set the camera to run for a while as the largest nestling exercised its wings. Fortunately, it jumped while the camera was rolling. First, all three are fed a beak full of earthworms. Then the jump. Mama robin with her worn and tattered plumage makes an attempt to reward the jumper with more worms.

That mother is WORN OUT!

The poor mom looked like she’s been run through a laundry dryer she was so overworked.  The next morning the other two chicks fledged and followed mom into the hedge behind the house. The parents will find bugs for them for a few more days until they get the hang of it. Now that the young were off on their own, I hoped mom would recover quickly.

Finally, I dissected the nest to see why it seemed so tall.  It was 10” high and seemed to have a false start at the 6” level. There was a “bowl” shape, but not finished.

I originally thought, based on Rick’s surmise, that this was the third time the robin had nested, and her nests were build successively on top of each other. His dissection showed that we were wrong. He emailed me this:

I assumed wrong.  I have now dissected the nest and find that it was not a three story nest at all.  A little data goes a long way.

The nest is 10″ high and the lower part is simply foundation material.  There is no finished “bowl”, only the suggestion of one at the 6″ level.

It appears she started to finish it but then decided it wasn’t high enough and put more material on top.

Attached is a picture of the dissection showing the lower and top sections.

Earlier activity in the spring must have been nest building and brooding of the current clutch.

 

Readers’ wildlife video and photos

February 3, 2022 • 9:00 am

Today we have a video and a couple of photos from a couple of readers. (All readers’ comments and IDs are indented; click photos to enlarge them.)

The video below comes from Avi Burstein, who sent this information:

I just caught this footage outside my home in the Catskills of a woodpecker creating a nest. Thought you’d enjoy it. Feel free to share it with your readers. I was inside my home while filming so no audio.

I believe this is a pileated woodpecker, (Dryocopus pileatus).

From Bryan Lepore:

Dear PCC(E) – the early morning walk revealed a breathtaking decoration of hoarfrost on a lilac (Syringa vulgaris). It brought to mind the absolute zero discussion. I picked out this particular detail for a more artistic interpretation. Perhaps a story can be invented for it by the beholder:

Some plants from Hawaii by Emilio d’Alise. I’m not sure, nor is he, whether these are native or introduced, nor do we have the species or IDs (His note on our first batch was “here are a bunch of flowers photos from when I lived in Hawaiʻi.”) Just enjoy the beauty:

On January 15 I published a few photos by Christopher Moss of a pair of squirrels fighting over a feeder full of sunflower seeds.  They achieved a temporary truce, but then. . .

Here are the remaining pictures of the squirrels learning to tolerate each other. Their truce didn’t last long, as they were back to fighting noisily yesterday.

Readers’ wildlife photos (and video and painting)

August 23, 2021 • 8:00 am

Last Friday I posted the tweet below, and suggested that because reader and biologist Lou Jost works in Ecuador and Peru, where this toucan lives, he might have seen one. (Lou works at a field station in Ecuador.) Indeed he had: he’d even filmed one and painted one of its relatives. Here’s Lou’s contribution (his words are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them).

First, the tweet I showed the other day:

From Lou:

A few days ago Jerry posted a photograph of a beautiful toucan, so colorful that he asked whether the colors were real. The bird was the Plate-billed Mountain-Toucan, Andigena laminirostris, native to the western Andes of Ecuador and Colombia. I can vouch for the fact that the bird really is as beautiful as that photo showed. It is a common bird in good-quality cloud forest here in Ecuador, and we have them in two of our reserves.

One afternoon while I was showing some visitors our birds, one of these toucans flew low over the road in front of the car and landed in a roadside tree in perfect light. I told the car to stop and we stayed there watching, photographing, and videoing this magnificent bird for half an hour. Even though we had all seen this species many times before, there was something special about the perfect light, the close distance, and the absolute lack of fear or concern in the bird, and the way it posed for us at every possible angle. Two of the people in the car were Bob Ridgely, author of the Birds of Ecuador field guide, and veteran Ecuadorian ornithologist  Pancho Sornoza. As we were all watching the bird, Pancho said “Bob, this is the best bird sighting I’ve ever had in all my life”. This from a guy who had spent his whole life watching birds in Ecuador.

Here’s Lou’s wonderful video:

A photo montage:

Lou is also an artist and did a painting or a related species::

Here is my painting of another Ecuadorian member of the same genus, the Gray-breasted Mountain-Toucan, Andigena hypoglauca. This species lives at much higher elevations than the Plate-billed Mountain-Toucan, and only on the eastern side of the Andes. It is one of my favorite birds. These toucans mostly eat fruit, but their long bills also facilitate reaching into hole nests of other birds and eating their eggs or young. Some toucans of a different genus are even known to kill and eat monkeys!