Category: readers’ videos

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 2, 2020 • 7:45 am

We have two contributors today. First, Art Williams sent some photos and videos, which include a fawn. Remember, if you see a fawn by itself, especially a very young one, leave it alone, as it’s almost certain that it was been left to shelter place while Mom went off foraging. Only call for help if it stays in place and mom doesn’t return for a day or so. Art’s captions are indented.

Here are some photos and a video of the suburban wildlife around Loveland, Ohio, just outside of Cincinnati. The raptor is a juvenile red-tailed hawk, I think. He or she and mate have been very active, screeching their presence every morning, likely having a brood somewhere close by.

My wife noticed the fawn sunning itself in the yard and couldn’t have been more than a few hours old. Its mom had left to forage and he instinctively knew to head for the dappled shadowy cover of a nearby Hemlock tree. The link to the video shows just how wobbly the little guy is. It’s a little shaky and narrated by my over-concerned wife who fears the baby has been left by its mom. After several hours we were worried that it actually had been abandoned, but Mom came back eventually and the two scampered off into the woods.

JAC: Fawns are so beautiful! They’re the ducklings of mammals.

Art also sent a video he made:

And an astronomy photo by Tim Anderson in Australia:

This image shows NGC4956, a large barred spiral galaxy in the Centaurus constellation. It also shows a number of other, more distant galaxies dotted around the field of view. The galaxy was first observed by James Dunlap from Parramatta in NSW during 1826.

Reader’s wildlife video

May 26, 2020 • 7:45 am

Today we have a video of an interspecific brawl sent by Swiss biologist Jacques Hausser and taken by his daughter in law in the town of Bassins (also Switzerland) last Friday. With permission, I put the video on YouTube so I could embed it.

Jacques’s title and notes are indented below. There are also three bonus photos:

Interspecific fighting for a nesting hole

This afternoon, Deny, my daughter-in-law, heard a great commotion, followed by a thump, and saw two birds fighting on the ground. She videotaped part of the scene, then brought me the two birds still clutching to each other. Unable to get them apart (the sharp claws of the swift were firmly hooked in the starling’s flesh) I had to bring them to a rehab center.

Why this fight? The neighbor’s house  was partly renovated this winter, and, quite typically, several nesting opportunities disappeared in the process, including probably the one of this frustrated swift coming back from Africa, who tried to expel the starling from its  nest – I found some eggs broken on the soil, too. I had planned to built swift nesting boxes, but with the Covid-19, my plans remained at the paper stage…

The cast of characters (be sure to put the sound up):

Starling: Starling, Sturnus vulgaris, and Common swift, Apus apus.
Interested onlooker and would-be actor: Domino, my cat [Felis catus].
Vocals: mostly carrion crow, Corvus corone, very interested too.

I asked Jacques if the birds would be okay, and apparently the swift was released swiftly (that’s a “Tom Swifty“, making it a double pun), but the starling, with a wound in the chest, will require more days of care, though she too will pull through (see below):

it was something not observed every day. The video was taken by my daughter-in-law Denielle Hausser. According to the staff in the rehab, the starling will be OK after some more days of care.
More information from Jacques:
Looking at the picture below from Professor David Norman of the Merseyside ringing group (reproduced with permission), you can understand the suffering of the starling! Although “Apus” means footless, swift have rather special “pamprodactyl” feet, with the four fingers usually kept more or less parallel in the front direction – to hang on vertical walls – but they can oppose fingers 1-2 to fingers 3-4 to grasp something – including perhaps each other in their aerial mating. Remember that swifts can stay in the air up to 9 months, loving, hunting, sleeping, and drinking on the wing. They land only for breeding, or when they are caught in a bad or cold weather.

Look at those swift talons!
I have a picture of the male (?) starling from the same pair.
The swifts are hard to photograph, but I have a very bad picture I like nevertheless.

 

Readers’ wildlife videos

April 21, 2020 • 7:45 am

Reader Rick Longworth sent us a largesse of not one, not two, but three wildlife videos he made. Turn up the sound, as there’s music or bird sounds, too. Rick’s captions are indented:

Fox squirrel (Sciurus niger) acrobatics. This fussy female is checking out the left over apples and crab apples from last season. She is very shy of my camera, so I had to shoot through window glass.

 

A pair of wood ducks (Aix sponsa) have been checking out my new duck box. The entrance hole is on the far side, and the female is trying to see if it suits her taste. The drake stands guard and fends off a competing female. I hope they stick around and raise a brood.

A time-lapse of the full moon setting over the Snake River at the end of March. Sound is in real time.

Readers’ wildlife photos and videos

March 6, 2020 • 7:45 am

Origami artist and physicist Robert Lang has contributed several batches of photos to this site, and today proffers an especially nice contribution of photos and videos. Bocats! I’ll let him tell you about it.

This email combines two of the great passions of WEIT: Reader’s Wildlife Photos™, and kitties! Last year I moved to Southern California, and my studio window looks out into the Angeles National Forest, from which I get regular visitors of the four-legged and winged kind. In January, a mother bobcat (Lynx rufus) and her two kittens visited the meadow outside my window and spent some time playing together, giving me the opportunity to shoot the photos below:

When I asked which were the kittens, and which was mom, and whether there was a color difference, Robert replied.

Yes, the kittens are the oranger ones. In the videos [below], it’s a bit easier to tell, because the kittens are a bit smaller than the mother, but they’re close to full-grown.

But wait! There’s more!

I also shot two videos [JAC: and there are two more below these]:

 

That was early January. In late February, I walked out my front door and another bobcat was sitting about 20’ away. I didn’t have my long-lens camera with me, but shot two videos.

Robert added this:

I’d seen bobcats briefly twice before in the new studio, but usually it was just a glimpse as they went trotting by. This was the first time any stuck around. If indeed the second one was the same female, then it suggests that (a) my meadow is part of her home range, and (b) she’s comfortable with my presence (since she obviously knew I was standing there filming her), so I hope that means I’ll be seeing more of her (and her offspring)!

Note the origami sculpture:

 

When it walks away in the second video, it looks pretty heavy-bodied, which makes me wonder if it might be the same female, pregnant with the next litter (this would be the time of year for that).

This subject is especially fitting for WEIT The Website, because my wife’s copy of WEIT The Book has a hand-drawn bobcat in it, drawn by you in 2012!

Readers’ wildlife videos

February 23, 2020 • 7:45 am

Tara Tanaka (Vimeo page here, flickr page here) was so stimulated by some of the comments on her recent video—remarks about why a fishing egret would bob its head and neck—that she produced a new one, also showing a piscivorous bird (an American bittern) swaying its head and neck. I asked her how she thought this behavior was adaptive (if it is), and she replied: “I did some very minimal research, and it’s said to imitate grass swaying in the wind – which makes perfect sense for the Bittern; however, it seems to me that the Great Egret may be trying to distract the prey with the movement of its very visible neck, but that’s just my 2 cents.”

Here are the Vimeo notes; be sure to watch with sound on and the video enlarged:

I had so many comments on the way that the Great Egret moved its head and neck in the Great Backyard Bird Count video that I decided to reach back into some five-year old American Bittern footage that I’d been meaning to edit to show the master of bird swaying.

I regularly change the speed in my videos depending on what effect I’m trying to achieve, but I did want to mention that the flight scene at the very end was slowed down by 50 percent. The Little Blue Heron actually flies at the speed depicted in this clip, but the American Bittern has a very fast wing beat, twice as fast as in this video.

By the way, I’ve also discovered that Tara has a pair of cowboy boots, which are nice ones. Here they are, along with her omnipresent binoculars:

Readers’ wildlife videos

February 20, 2020 • 7:30 am

Nature videographer and regular Tara Tanaka (Vimeo page here, flickr page here) has a new video, one that features some of my favorite waterfowl. I think it’s one of the best videos she’s done to date, so be sure to watch. Tara’s Vimeo notes are indented.  I’ll be speaking in Tallahassee next month and have been invited to visit Tara’s home and see her famous blind. Perhaps I’ll see my first wood duck in the wild!

The Great Backyard Bird Count, an annual, worldwide event, took place on February 14-17 this year, and over a quarter million lists have been submitted to eBird.org so far. The second day was a spectacular winter day in Florida, and I spent the first two and the last three hours of daylight in my photo blind, which is currently located in our backyard cypress swamp that we manage as a wildlife sanctuary. This video represents the highlights of five hours of viewing condensed into five minutes. Enjoy!

Reader’s wildlife photo (and video)

February 16, 2020 • 7:45 am

As I reported, Andreas Kay, a superb photographer of Ecuadorian biodiversity, died last October at the young age of 56.  It was a tragic loss, but he left behind a big legacy: nearly 30,000 unpublished photos of insects and plants from Andean Ecuador. These were inherited by reader Lou Jost, a biologist who inhabits a field station in the Ecuadorian rainforest. Lou has promised to send samples of Andreas’s photos from time to time, so we’ll be able to enjoy them and remember the man.

What I didn’t know until Lou wrote last is that Andreas took videos as well, and very good ones (you can see his YouTube site here). Two days ago Lou sent me one of Andreas’s photos and a link to a video of the insect in the picture. First, the photo with Andreas’s caption:

These moss mimic Stick Insects (Trychopeplus thaumasius?) were filmed at Finca Palmonte near Baños in the cloud forest of Ecuador. During daytime they hang nearly imperceptible between moss covered twigs and only become active at night to feed on leaves. They not only look like moss but even move like waving in the wind. 

Can you spot it?

Now look at the video and see how the thing moves erratically. It shows that natural selection for mimicry can operate not just on appearance, but also on behavior. (Sound up).

Also from Andreas:

Watch two other videos of this species: https://youtu.be/vZPVeJhld_I and https://youtu.be/xCqqnu2Xk2M

I can’t help but add Andreas’s post from Facebook (forwarded by Lou) when he knew he was dying of a brain tumor. It always makes me tear up. A naturalist to the end. . .