Category: photography

Readers’ wildlife posts

December 23, 2025 • 8:30 am

Today we have some lovely bird photos from Scott Ritchie of Cairns, Australia. Scott’s captions are indented and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Scott’s Facebook page, full of great photos, is here. (Photos used with permission.)

Social media, including Facebook, gets quite a bit of negative press these days. I get that. But one of the great values of social media is that it can put you in contact with people who can really help you out. In Sept. 2025, I started posting bird photos from my Western Australia trip. I was contacted by John Edmond, who lives in Perth. Last year, I met John in Cairns on our regular Tuesday AM bird walk, and then showed him some local birds along the Cairns Esplanade. John loves a twitch, and was especially happy to see Nordy, Nordmann’s Greenshank.

So John reached out on FB and offered to take me for a day’s birding in Perth. We had a great time and I particularly liked touring around Herdsman Lake. Here are some of my favourite images from that day’s birding.

The Pink-eared Duck [Malacorhynchus membranaceus] is one of my favourite birds. I was lucky to get nice close images of this bird. If you’re wondering about the name, look carefully at the head. You can just see a little bit of pink behind his eye. Personally, I’d name it the Zebra-breasted Duck.

And another. The flaps along the bill are used to help funnel microbe-rich water into their mouth.

The Great Crested Grebe [Podiceps cristatus] is another amazing bird. I just love the hairdo and the neck feathers during breeding season. Interestingly, this bird is found in wetlands from Asia Europe, Africa, and Australia. This is one of the grebes that does a upright mating dance that you may have seen on TV:

So am I gonna get lucky tonight? Let me think about it:

JAC: Here’s a YouTube video I found of the mating dance of this species. Don’t miss any of it!

I love the raking light on this stunning bird:

The Australian Shelduck [Tadorna tadornoides] during breeding season. The female is the one with the spectacles. It’s obvious she’s the only one with a good sense to wear glasses:

I like these this couple out for an evening promenade in the quiet water:

Herdman Lake like has more than water birds. This pair of Tawny Frogmouths [Podargus strigoides] are a bit of an institution there. People come around looking for these interesting, well camouflaged birds. See me if you can:

Australian Reed Warbler [Acrocephalus australis] was regularly heard singing in the rushes. Lovely calls—the sound of the Aussie wetlands:

At an earlier stop, I was happy to see the Western Spinebill [Acanthorhynchus superciliosus]. It’s not the world’s best shot, but it’s still beautiful bird and I hope to get better views of it in the future:

And finally, I’ll leave off this WA tour with a robin, a male Scarlet Robin [Petroica boodang]. Robins are so cute and they sit nicely for the camera, not jumping around like some crazy caffeinated gym rat like so many birds do. Speaking which I’m off for a coffee and a workout to work off some of the pounds I put on this trip:

Readers’ wildlife photos

December 22, 2025 • 8:30 am

Today we have more lovely butterfly photos sent in by Pratyaydipta Rudra, a statistician at Oklahoma State University, who notes that “the first twelve are photographed by me and the last two by my wife (Sreemala Das Majumder). She is a Ph.D. student in Environmental Sciences at Oklahoma State University.”  The pair has a bird-and-butterfly photo site called Wingmates. Pratyay’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. 

We have photographed many butterflies over the last couple of years, so I wanted to share on more batch of them – this time some larger ones from the family Papilionidae that are all commonly known as swallowtails.

Giant Swallowtail (Papilio cresphontes), our largest butterfly species. The flower is of Tall Thistle (Cirsium altissimum), which is native in our region:

Black Swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes) on wild coneflower (I believe Echinacea pallida) and looking like a fancy kite! These are probably the most common breeding Swallowtails in our area. We had many caterpillars on our fennel this year:

Pipevine Swallowtail (Battus philenor) – Gotta love these with all the beautiful iridescence. They are relatively easy to invite into your area if you have pipevine on your property. They avoid predators by being poisonous/distasteful:

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio glaucus), a common migrant:

This one is also an Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio glaucus), but it is a dark morph female. While males are always yellow, females have two morphs – yellow and dark. It is thought that by being dark, they benefit from mimicking the distasteful Pipevine Swallowtail (Battus philenor). This is true for some other species such as Spicebush Swallowtail (Papilio troilus), Black Swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes), Red-spotted Purple (Limenitis arthemis) etc.:

Spicebush Swallowtail (Papilio troilus), which looks quite similar to a Black Swallowtail:

Dorsal side of the Giant Swallowtail (Papilio cresphontes):

This one is not from Oklahoma. These two Palamedes Swallowtails (Papilio Palamedes) chasing each other in the swamps of North Carolina:

Zebra Swallowtail (Eurytides marcellus), another Eastern species. Love their long tails!:

I think this image captures all the common Western swallowtail species. The one coming in and the one in front at the right are both Two-tailed Swallowtails (Papilio multicaudata). One on the left is definitely a Pale Swallowtail (Papilio eurymedon), and I think the one behind the right Two-tailed is a Western Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio rutulus), but please correct me if I am wrong. All of these congregated in this rocky area to get the necessary nutrients on a sunny day in the Rocky Mountains, of Colorado:

Another Two-tailed in flight and some others from the same area:

A black-on-black image of a Black Swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes) hovering over garden phlox:

These last two photos are by Sreemala:

Symmetry! Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio glaucus) coming in:

Yet another photo of a Giant Swallowtail (Papilio cresphontes) from our garden:

Readers’ wildlife photographs

December 21, 2025 • 8:15 am

I have one more batch to go, as Mark Sturtevant kindly sent in a batch of arthropod photos. Mark’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.  And send in your photos, please!

These are pictures from two summers ago. The first pictures wrap up a trip that I had begun earlier, where I visited Illinois to witness the rare dual emergence of 13- and 17-year periodical cicadas. What remains from that batch are dragonflies.

The first of these are female and male Midland Clubtails, Gomphurus fraternus:

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Next is a terrible picture that totally made my day! This is the Swamp Darner, Epiaeschna heros, and I’ve been chasing this species for years as it is one of the largest dragonflies in the US, but it ranges just south of where I live. The link provides a picture that gives a better idea about their size:

It took off immediately after, but I was very glad to even get this. I had recently learned that this is the only living species in its genus, and the rest are known only from fossils.

The last dragonfly is a Twelve-spotted Skimmer, Libellula pulchella. This is an exceedingly common species so I usually don’t bother with them, but the air was very calm so I was able to get a quick manual focus stack with a long lens:

Next, we return back to my normal hunting grounds in Michigan. On one outing to an area park I had found this strongly melanistic lady beetle. Color variations are not unusual in this group, but I’ve never seen one like this. I think it is a Fifteen-spotted Lady Beetle (Anatis labiculata), based on various hints about its morphology. They are also spotted beetles, but I could not find one of those pose alongside it so I used the very familiar Asian Lady Beetle instead (Harmonia axyridis):

Spiders are always welcome, right? A species that is common near water is the Long-jawed Orbweaver (Tetragnatha sp.). These are exceptionally delicate and shy spiders, and their elongated chelicerae and fangs are not there to be alarming. Rather, they are specialized tools for picking mosquitos out of their web, and for clasping one another during mating. The link shows a video of the latter activity.

This is a portrait of a male, and he would flee at the slightest disturbance during the focus stacking session at the dining room table. It took hours to get this picture, and it was exhausting! :

This scene from a little shop of horrors is from inside the lair of a Candy-striped spider (Enoplognatha ovata). The common name refers to a color variation with red stripes, as shown at the link, but others are a more plain variety like this one. Candy-striped spiders build sparse webs under leaves and under flowers, and to me the webs seem next to worthless for entangling prey, so perhaps their role is to provide a system of trip lines that merely delay arthropods while they are passing through while also alerting the spider so that it can run out and attack. The species has some notoriety because of its habit of leaving its base at night to patrol the surrounding area searching for daytime-active insects that have bedded themselves down on plants to sleep. Once discovered, this prey does not wake up again.  The picture is a quick manual focus stack of a typical encounter from my yard, followed by a cropped version:

Finally, how do crab spiders do it? I’ve never seen one move fast, and yet they commonly take down very alert prey that one would think would know better. Here for example is a Ground Crab Spider (Xysticus sp.) making a meal out of a jumping spider (Phidippus clarus). Note the fang puncture marks. I routinely find crab spiders with very alert and fast kinds of prey like this, including flies, bees, and wasps, and yet crab spiders seem lethargic in their movements. So how do they do it?

I recently posted that picture online and expressed my bafflement about this mystery. A friend did some investigating and found this video with a different species of crab spider. All I can say is mystery solved, and 😳!

Readers’ wildlife photos

December 19, 2025 • 8:25 am

Ecologist Susan Harrison contributed another batch of photos from her visit to Belize (see part 1 here). The IDs and her captions are indented below, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Belize – Birds of the Mennonite Farmlands

Diverse agricultural landscapes came as a pleasant surprise on a recent birding trip to northern Belize.  Small to medium-sized family farms, neatly arrayed, grew rice, cattle, chickens, fruits and vegetables.  We saw native birds of many kinds in the fields and around the homes, barns, ponds, hedgerows and woodlots.  Is this what U.S. farmlands looked like before the modern agro-industrial era, I wondered?

Many of the farmers are pious German-speaking Mennonites who settled here in the 1950s to practice their ways in a society tolerant of their anti-militarism and anti-modernity. The most conservative among them avoid not only cars but also rubber tires, and use machinery with metal wheels or treads only.  While it felt impolite to photograph the people in their hand-sewn overalls and dresses, I did grab a tractor shot or two.

Mennonite steel-wheeled tractor:

Our main quarry here was the Jabiru (Jabiru mycteria), a massive tropical stork that is scarce in much of its range but flourishes in the northern Belize farm country.

Jabiru in a rice field:

Jabirus mixed with smaller Wood Storks (Mycteria americana) and Northern Jacanas (Jacana spinosa) in a pasture of Brahman cattle:

Other birds we saw in these farmlands:

Laughing Falcons (Herpetotheres cachinnans):

Aplomado Falcons (Falco femoralis):

Bat Falcon (Falco rufigularis) pursuing dragonflies over a rice field at blinding speed:

Fork-tailed Flycatcher (Tyrannus savana):

Vermilion Flycatcher (Pyrocephalus rubinus):

Mangrove Cuckoo (Coccyzus minor):

Northern Potoo (Nyctibius jamaicensis), a bizarre giant nightjar:

Ringed Kingfisher (Megaceryle torquata):

Roadside Hawk (Rupornis magnirostris):

Morelet’s Seedeater (Sporophila morelleti):

Readers’ wildlife photos

December 18, 2025 • 8:30 am

We are back today with a series of underwater photos of SHARKS taken by Peter Klaver. Peter’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

During scuba diving off Bimini, Bahamas my scuba diving buddies and I went on two hammerhead shark feeding dives. The waters around Bimini are home to the Great hammerhead, Sphyrna mokarran, that typically grows to over 4m and over 400 kg. We saw several smaller ones and a large female that one of our dive guides said was ~14 feet long.

While the shark feed dives are not a very natural setting, such objections quickly disappeared from my mind as I saw a nearly half metric ton shark sometimes pass by less than 1 foot away from me. Below are some video frames, with a few divers (further away from the camera than the shark admittedly, making the shark look bigger) included in the last frame for size.

Readers’ wildlife photos

December 16, 2025 • 8:15 am

Today, courtesy of Rik Gern, we once again enter the mysterious world of fungi. Rik’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Here is the second batch of photos of Pinewood gingertail (Xeromphalina campanella) mushrooms from Wisconsin’s northwoods.  I tried to focus on portraits of individual mushrooms in this series.

This picture of the gills on the underside of the cap was taken using natural light.

The following two shots utilized a flash. (3-4) I like how they reveal more detail, and the flash sure makes the exposure easier, but something about the lighting doesn’t feel quite right.

This picture was a lot harder to process, but the natural light made it more satisfying:

The last several pictures are all of the same cluster of mushrooms. There was something about this grouping that seemed majestic and it was fun to try to give each shot a different feel:

Readers’ wildlife photos

December 15, 2025 • 8:25 am

Susan Harrison is back from Belize with bird photos for us. (And if you have any photos of your own, please send them in!).  Susan’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.

Belize:  the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary

Your correspondent has just returned from a birding trip to Belize, a wonderful country that has preserved over 30% of its land area for wildlife, and where a relatively small-scale and bird-friendly style of agriculture is widely practiced.  Today’s photos are from the last place we visited, the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary, a massive complex of lagoons, swamps and forests in middle northern Belize.  Our exceptionally talented guide grew up here when the small village of Crooked Tree was accessible only by boat in the wet season.  When not guiding birdwatchers, he farms coconuts and avocados here.

We were most fortunate to see the elusive Sungrebe (Heliornis fulica).  Despite its name, this waterbird haunts densely shaded riverbanks and is not a grebe; it has no close relatives.  On the heels of a heavy downpour, we observed this one rapidly plucking damselflies off of overhanging foliage.

Sungrebe:

Another exciting sighting was a colony of Boat-Billed Herons (Cochlearius cochlearius).  These nocturnal hunters do not seize their prey like other herons but instead use their enormous bills in a baleen-like fashion.  During daytime they hide in dense thickets.  This one showed us a yawn.

Boat-billed Heron:

Among the many large, fish-devouring water birds were Bare-throated Tiger Herons (Tigrisoma mexicanum) and Anhingas (Anhinga anhinga).

Bare-throated Tiger Heron:

Anhinga:

We watched as Limpkins (Aramis guarauna), a weird wading bird in its own family, speared and gobbled Apple Snails (Pomacea), this bird’s single food source.  At the same time, these snails were equally of interest to Snail Kites (Rostrhamus sociabilis), who sometimes plucked them away from the Limpkins instead of from the mud.

Limpkin, with a Northern Jacana (Jacana spinosa) in front:

Northern Jacana closeup, showing its massive feet:

Snail Kites:

Skulking by the shore we saw several Russet-naped Wood Rails (Aramides albiventris), an almost comical bird that makes all other rails seem drab indeed.

Russet-naped Wood Rail:

Raptors were also abundant, and two of the more exciting finds were Black-collared Hawks (Busarellus nigricollis) and a Gray-headed Kite (Leptodon cayanensis).

Black-collared Hawk adult and immature:

Gray-headed Kite:

We also saw many wonderful land birds at Crooked Tree, of which I’ll show just a few of the most special.  Yellow-headed Amazons (Amazona oratrix) are among the many parrots that visit Crooked Tree to feed on the local cashew crop; this species is endangered because its intelligence makes it popular in the pet trade.

Yellow-headed Amazons:

Rufous-tailed Jacamars (Galbula ruficauda) resemble giant hummingbirds but are actually insectivores more closely related to woodpeckers and toucans.    The cliffs that Jacamars require for nesting are scarce in low-lying Belize, but Mayan ruins serve the purpose nicely.  We saw this Jacamar at the impressive Lamanai ruins complex.

Rufous-tailed Jacamar:

Detail of the Jaguar Temple at the Lamanai ruins, in which the rectangular holes create a stylized jaguar face:

Olive-throated Parakeets (Eupsittula nana) occurred everywhere we went in Belize, but only in the Caribbean Pine (Pinus caribaea) woodlands of Crooked Tree did they pose low enough for decent photos.

Olive-throated Parakeets: