Category: Readers’ wildlife

Readers’ wildlife photos

August 23, 2026 • 8:15 am

Today’s photos are from Dean Graetz, who’s compiled various assorted photos, each with a story. Click on the photos to enlarge them; Dean’s stories and captions are indented.

Photos with a Story

Photography makes my life interesting.  I photograph scenes that look interesting and then explore the story they have to tell.  Almost always, the story is far more interesting than my photograph.  Here are eight examples of photos and their story.

This is the most beautiful flower I know. It is a dry country ephemeral and its (arterial) blood-red flowers are stunning. It is much loved and cultivated under the name Sturts Desert Pea (Swainsona formosa).  Its story is from the ‘Dreamtime’ mythology of Aboriginal people.  A young women (and child) who were promised to a Warrior eloped with another man: an act punishable by death.  The vengeful jilted Warrior tracked them, and at night, killed all three.  At dawn, he was horrified to find these flowers growing where blood had been spilt.  No matter where he fled, dawn relentlessly revealed the persecuting blood flowers, displaying his crime and eventually destroying him.:

The story of this ‘cute’ image is a technological one.  The water-repellent waxy cuticle of this sturdy leaf forces the rain drops to coalesce and form slightly-flattened spherical globules.  Each globule now acts as a lens visibly enlarging details of the underlying leaf surface.  A natural microscope.  In the1670s, an amateur Dutch scientist, Leeuwenhoek, made the first microscope using simple glass beads—a globule lookalike—as lenses.  His invention significantly and irreversibly enhanced human observing power and began the critical science of microbiology.  Since before and after, with raindrops and waxy leaves, Nature continues to demonstrate its small-scale microscopes:

A near-spherical, balanced granite rock poses three questions: why round, why balanced, and how did it get there?  Roundness is a granite characteristic because it (exfoliate) weathers in large slivers (see LHS edge below) like a peeling orange.  The rock is balanced because a line through its centre of mass passes through the contact area with the base rock – thus perfectly vertical.  Because there is no hard rock connection between the balanced and its base, how did it get there?  The geological answer is a step-wise process beginning with the cooling and cracking of liquid magma, millions to billions of years ago, then chemical weathering of hard rock to less resistant material, and finally the eroding away of the softer material.  So, the balanced rock in the picture is the remnant core of very, very much larger volume of granite now removed – like the pit/stone of a peach.  It is difficult to accept this explanation because we just cannot grasp the vast expanse of time involved, but the circumstantial geological evidence is there:

A female Leaf Curling Spider (Phonognatha graeffei) hidden by the structure she built, waits for the vibrations of flying insects struggling in her web.  This one species, though common, has an uncommon set of behaviours such as selecting a leaf, curling and silking it into shape, then hauling it up from ground level and centring it into a funnelling web.  The sexes cohabit in separate locations within the sheltering leaf.  This spider’s story raises the usual two questions.  The Why question is easy – because it obviously works.  The species is sufficiently abundant to be labelled Common.  How could such a strategy come to be?  There is the usual blind faith assertion of Big G’s intelligent design.  Or the reasoned argument that because the behaviour is instinctive, not learned, then it must be heritable and therefore likely variable.  Thereafter, Nature will relentlessly reward the strategy that ‘works best’, as it has done here:

This is a difficult photo to interpret.  I was shooting straight up into the sky.  The uppermost layer is actually a shelf or ledge projecting out over the lower rock wall.  The story here is based on two features.  There are two very different rock types with a very sharp boundary between the two.  The upper layer appears to have been smeared over the lower.  The upper is a layer of rocky ‘rubbish’, materials of diverse types and sizes jumbled together.  It looks like what a bulldozer blade might push up.  The bulldozer here was a glacier.  The timing was about 720 million years ago when this part of the Australian continent was located at the Equator.  Now known as the Sturtian Glaciation, it began the speculation that planet Earth may once have been Snowball Earth.  Geological timing and ages are always thought-provoking:

This magnificently gaudy grasshopper introduces an intriguing story.  Locally known as Leichhardt’s Grasshopper (Petasida ephippigera), its flamboyant colouring says, ‘don’t eat me’.  It is not common, found only on certain plants in three areas of northern Australia.  The intriguing story is about Leichhardt, a young man seeking fame and fortune as an explorer and naturalist.  Which he did with his 1845 expedition (4000 km, 2500 m, 443 days long).  On that long walk, he encountered and described this grasshopper species noting their abundance.  Subsequently, he achieved lasting fame with his 1848 expedition to span the East to West coasts of the continent (4000 km, 2500 m), an expedition that completely disappeared without a trace.  Interestingly, so did the namesake grasshopper.  It was assumed extinct until positively identified more than a hundred years after their 1845 description of abundance.  I photographed this one in the same type of country where Leichhardt first saw them.  This was a minor thrill because I had long known the story and had speculated where in Australia’s deserts the 1848 Leichhardt party had ‘done a perish’:

Kenya (30 years ago): Day1.  Field work with the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).  My local (Kikuyu) Assistants are using my soil colour charts to determine the colour classification of their skin.  I had explained to them that Melanin determined the skin colour of all humans: colour variation was in the amount and packaging.  My sermon concluded with the statement that no people were Black.  Very dark Brown: Yes.  But not the derogatory Black.  My two Assistants agreed but were quite sure that the Maasai were Black.  I knew that the Kikuyu disliked the Maasai and thought this statement reflected cultural bias, not fact.  Nobody was Black!:

Kenya: Day2.  UNEP added a young woman to the fieldwork.  Neither of us knew why.  A young American non-scientist, who was very excited to be out in the African Bush.  My concern was that bra-less may be comfortable but potentially unwise.  Come noon, universal lunchtime, with the wonderful lunch packs the tourist hotels provided.  Right on time, two Maasai appeared, both armed, announced by my retreating Assistants as “Trouble, Bwana, trouble!”  I did think then that it could turn into an SOS moment (aka Shit!  Oh!  Shit!).  However, it was peacefully resolved by international trade.  The two Maasai agreed to one photograph and a swift departure for two unopened lunch boxes, one Australian and one American.  She thought it was all thrilling.  I was both hungry and wrong.  The skin colour of one Maasai was the darkest I had ever seen.  But Black?  I plead selective breeding because the Maasai value Black as a spiritual ‘strong’ colour and that could influence mate choice.  My Kikuyu Assistants were delighted that they knew more than the Bwana:

Readers’ wildlife photos (and video)

August 20, 2026 • 8:16 am

The Jason Arday mess his died down (I hope), there’s not much news save the U.S. national debt is pushing 40 TRILLION dollars, so now is a good time for some restful and beautiful wildlife photos.

Today we present part 2 of the photos that Bruce Lyon of UC Santa Cruz posted; the photos were taken during his field work in Alaska on birds. (Part 1 is here.). There’s one video at the beginning.  Bruce’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here’s Bruce’s introduction to the last part, and I forgot to put the video in. This time it’s here:

I spent the summer researching songbirds on St Paul Island, one of the Pribilof Islands way out in the Bering Sea in Alaska. On a few different days I took a break from our study of songbirds to enjoy the fabulous seabirds. St. Paul is famous for it seabirds and a lot of naturalists visit the island to see several seabirds that are endemic to the Bering Sea. By my count, 13 species of seabirds breed on St Paul.

Here is a video to give a sense of the seabird cliffs. At some of the best cliffs one can see most of the seabird species at at single location.

Bruce added this:

The video shows Ridge Wall, a favorite with naturalists and photographers because several species are easily observed at eye level from a fairly close distance. The trumpeting noises are murres.

And today’s photos:

Thick-billed murre (Uria lomvia) with its penguin-like plumage. Murres are completely unrelated to penguins but a relative of the murres, the great auk, did give its name to the penguins. Apparently the Welsh called great auks pen gwyn and the name was given to the lookalike penguins by early south polar explorers:

Murre eggs are hypervariable for individual recognition and some individuals have particularly gorgeous eggs. This murre has the prettiest of the colors—bright turquoise:

Common murre (Uria aalge). This species lacks the white line on the beak and is browner than thick-bills. In some lighting they almost look coppery:

Common murre trying to land in a strong upblast:

We even had a dovekie (Alle alle), extremely rare for St Paul Island. These are convergent with least auklets (tiny) but come from the murre lineage in the auks, not the auklets:

Black-legged kittiwake (Rissa tridactyla), a small cliff-nesting gull. When I took the kittiwake photos below it was very windy and the kittiwakes were playing in the updrafts. They would sit in one place and spin around like tops and sometimes even flip upside down. I love the bright orange mouth-lining and tongue, both of which are prominently displayed when the birds are screaming (which is most of the time).

Red-legged kittiwake (Rissa brevirostris), another Bering Sea endemic. Note the very short legs; the beak is shorter than in black-legged. 90% of the world’s population of red-legged kittiwakes breeds on nearby St George Island:

Kittiwakes use mud and wet vegetation to build their nests on the cliffs:

And kittiwakes build pretty substantial nests, plastered onto the rock so the nest does not fall off and plunge into the sea. Red-leggeds prefer sites that are tucked under overhangs:

A gathering of both species of kittiwakes on a beam in the harbor:

A glaucous-winged gull (Larus glaucescens) nest, apparently the first successful nest of this species on St Paul Island although they have bred on nearby islands:

Head shot of one of the parents. Close ups of gull heads show that gulls are rather nice birds. Gull species differ in the color of the iris and the fleshy eyering:

The aptly named and permanently embarrassed red-faced cormorant (Urile urile). Endemic to the Bering Sea:

A couple of red-faced cormorants with a nice rock arch and nesting seabirds in the background:

Readers’ wildlife photos

August 19, 2026 • 8:15 am

It’s been a while since Bruce Lyon has sent us photos, but he’s been off the in the wilds of Alaska studying birds. Here’s the first part of his odyssey, starring everyone’s favorite seabirds: puffins and auklets.  Bruce’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them:

I spent the summer researching songbirds on St Paul Island, one of the Pribilof Islands way out in the Bering Sea in Alaska. On a few different days I took a break from our study of songbirds to enjoy the fabulous seabirds. St. Paul is famous for it seabirds and a lot of naturalists visit the island to see several seabirds that are endemic to the Bering Sea. By my count, 13 species of seabirds breed on St Paul.

Here is a video to give a sense of the seabird cliffs. At some of the best cliffs one can see most of the seabird species at at single location.

The light often sucks on St Paul (dense fog) but on a few days the light was nice for photography (cloudy bright) so I rushed out to the seabird cliffs to try and get some nice photos. I find it particularly fun to get photos of seabirds in flight. Landings are particularly tough for the auks (Alcids; puffins, murres and auklets) because they are very heavy relative to their size of their wings and thus have to fly faster than most birds to stay in the air. Landing during strong and unpredictable gusts is  even more of a challenge and it is not uncommon for an individual bird to have three or for failed attempts at landing before success. If they don’t stick the landing, they loop out over the ocean in a huge circle and try again. Sometimes the airspace off the cliffs looks like an airport with a bunch of planes circling, waiting their turn to land.

Tufted puffin (Fratercula cirrhata) coming in for a landing

Tufted puffin heading out to sea:

Tufted puffins nest in burrows and apparently line their nest with plant material:

I’ll be damned if this puffin doesn’t look like Boris Johnson, the former wacky British Prime Minister! The gusty winds sometimes make for a bad hair day for the tufted puffins:

Horned puffin (Fratercula corniculata). It gets its name from the horn-like fleshy projections above the eyes

One puffin is nice, but two are better! Note that the sexes are similar—both molt into somewhat fancier plumage for breeding and grow colorful extensions on the bill.  In one seabird species, this mutual ornamentation has been attributed to mutual sexual selection, an idea Darwin proposed and then instantly rejected (he thought males are too randy to show mate choice):

Turning away from the cliff after a failed attempt at landing:

Parakeet auklet (Aethia psittacula). St Paul has three of the world’s four auklet species—auklets are endemic to the Bering Sea:

Parakeet auklet after an aborted landing:

Crested auklet (Aethia cristatella), a personal favorite. They smell like tangerines but I have never smelled one:

The tangerine scent is apparently strongest on the neck and here a courting group sniff each others’ necks (from a previous year):

One of my favorite photos from the summer—I like the dark auklet emerging from the dark background:

The crests play a role in the mutual sexual selection and both sexes prefer a mate with a large crest:

The crested auklets are often in quite large flocks—they always make my heart skip a beat! Here is a small group, which is better for photography that a large group that is not all in one focal plane:

This crested auklet liked to hang out with the least auklets. Perhaps this makes its crest seem more magnificent:

Least auklet (Aethia pusilla), a tiny (the smallest) auklet. About the length of a robin but chunkier. Small but very feisty and there is lots of fighting in the groups that perch together on boulders:

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.