View allAll Photos Tagged Behaviour
The meadow pipit is one of our more common species and their behaviour makes them easy subjects to photograph. Because of this they can be overlooked by birders and photographers.
This photograph was taken on one of the cliff top platforms at Bempton Cliffs, and whilst it may look like the bird is flying off, it just moved to a different part of the platform, making it closer to us. It flew into the fields after checking us out for a few minutes.
Behaviour and TraitsNo Hibernation: Unlike marmots, they remain active underground all winter.Haypiles: They cut and cure grass during the summer to store as winter food.Social Network: They live in family groups and share extensive burrow systems.Predators: They are a crucial food source for the local Little Owl population
If a mate can't walk on water he will be out of luck.
A combination of up to 20 steps per second, forceful slaps on the water’s surface with splayed feet, and an unusual stride help these grebes defy gravity
Isle Lake
Brent Geese / branta bernicla. Morston Quay, Norfolk. 12/03/22.
Like all geese, Brents are quick to defend their various living spaces, either on land or on water. They readily adopt threat postures, like this bird I captured standing on a mudbank.
I saw a lot of this during my time at Morston.
BEST VIEWED LARGE.
Marsh Harrier attacking Buzzard which was sitting too close to the Harrier's nest site. Fascinating to watch. The Buzzard eventually gave up and left..
I only managed a snapshot of this interesting behaviour. I wasn't sure if these were two males, facing off, or a courting couple?
I find this shot of the rather light coloured red deer stag quite amusing... I know why it's doing what it's doing but my 15 year old mindset can't help but think it's just being rather rude to the other deer!
A beautiful female Willughby's leafcutter bee visiting the bird's-foot trefoil that I planted in my garden for the bees and butterflies. This image is an older one; I'm looking forward to this year's butterfly and bee season.
This and the next image are of bird catching larva by a pond.
From Wiki:
The sunbittern (Eurypyga helias) is a bittern-like bird of tropical regions of the Americas, and the sole member of the family Eurypygidae (sometimes spelled Eurypigidae) and genus Eurypyga. It is found in Central and South America, and has three subspecies. The sunbittern shows both morphological and molecular similarities with the kagu (Rhynochetos jubatus) of New Caledonia, indicating a gondwanic origin, meaning they evolved before the continents drifted apart.
The bird has a generally subdued coloration, with fine linear patterns of black, grey and brown. Its remiges however have vividly colored middle webs, which with wings fully spread show bright eyespots in red, yellow, and black. These are shown to other sunbitterns in courtship and threat displays, or used to startle potential predators. Male and female adult sunbitterns can be differentiated by small differences in the feather patterns of the throat and head.
Sunbitterns are one of 12 species of birds in five families that have been described as fishing using baits or lures to attract prey to within striking distance. This type of behaviour falls within the common definition of tool use. In sunbitterns this behavior has only been observed in captive birds so far.
Taken on a Awesome trip with Juan Carlos Vindas (Neotropic photo tours) www.neotropicphototours.com
While it is technically still autumn, the weather outside is frightful and full of what winter has to offer - cold and snow.
This video shows a GGO going about its business of scanning for prey. This is the first 'snowy' owl I've seen this year. LOL
This egret isn't taking off to fly it is jumping up and down, trying to drum up some lunch in the shallows of the estuary. I was mesmerized watching it run around in a circle, flapping and jumping from one spot to another. I have only ever seen them slowly 'stalking' their dinner. Sorry the photos are dark but it was a really grey day with little light.
3 more in comments below
Late evening, just finished watching bear and on our way back to Hagensborg, when we saw this guy sitting at the side of the road. From his behaviour gather he was used to people, completely unfazed!
Things are changing within the pride. The girls are growing up and because they are remaining at the zoo and not being moved to another zoo, they needed to be implanted so no inbreeding would occur.
This was the day that happened and Milo was far more concerned about his girls than Misty was.
Both Milo & Kiros walked by the den doors doing their low lion grunts.
It surprised me that the boys were more concerned than Misty the mum.
To me zoo photography or any sort of animal photography is about knowing animal behaviour and if you know and preempt their behaviour you can ready yourself to what may unfold.
Most animals after they wake will yawn, (like Khumbu here )stretch and maybe shake or they will simply change position. Around their feed times they usually are a lot more active and will often move about their enclosure waiting for their meal, which is another opportunity to get different shots.
Knowing these behaviours and waiting for them pays off.
Yellow Warblers are established breeding migrants in the Ottawa area. The Britannia conservation area is packed with them, and their behaviour is quite striking. On the one hand, the males are super aggressive, as they try to establish territory and begin mating. The birds sing, attract competitors, and then chase each other to try to take over the territory. Once the chase is on, the males make a chipping sound, and the less assertive males seek cover. This hormonally-charged and somewhat manic process is an aspect of what makes the spring migration harder from a photography perspective; the birds heading south after a breeding season in the boreal forest are more tuckered out and content to find a food source.
Meanwhile the females who are mating begin the process of building nests. The materials are very delicate, for the most part, including the strips of plant material seen here. Other elements include feathers and even spider webs.
Just as the mating and very territorial Red-winged Blackbirds drive off other birds, here including Orioles and Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, the Yellow Warblers will drive off other warbler species. As most others are passing through on their way north, that is less of an issue, although in a year like this one, where there seem to be more Yellow Warblers than in recent years, and perhaps fewer of the other species, that makes it harder for bird watchers keen to follow the migration event.
The Birds of Ireland: A Field Guide with Jim Wilson
Shorebirds of Ireland with Jim Wilson.
Freshwater Birds of Ireland with Jim Wilson
www.markcarmodyphotography.com
A mixed bag of a flock containing predominantly Black-tailed Godwit, with Eurasian Teal and Black-headed Gull thrown in for good measure. This was part of a low-tide feeding frenzy at Poolbeg in Dublin Bay recently.
Goldeneye ducks adopt this remarkable Courtship /display/threat behaviour where they throw their head onto their backs whilst swimming and calling ,all at the same time!
Taken at Slimbridge WWT
These huge boulders are called glacial erratics ... dropped here like this eons ago when the glaciers that covered the island during the last ice age melted.
This is not really erratic behaviour for erratics, since it is not uncommon to find them perched in precarious places such as this. These are up on top of the Annieopsquotch Mountains. I have a photo on my photostream taken from the other side. A photo that really is an optical illusion. This one is a straight on photo taken just today.
www.flickr.com/photos/33774669@N00/4463751866/in/dateposted/
I recognise some of those megalomaniacal male tendencies you are describing, and why wouldn’t I (DUH!)? I know that ‘lost boy’ behaviour. It’s even attractive until one reaches a certain age, then it slopes off through unfortunate, and heads downhill rather swiftly towards downright tragedy. Applying the brakes at that stage is no party, let me tell you. Sometimes I feel as if I had been worn down up to the knees, a would-be demi-legged, own-trumpet-blowing, Falstaff, (if only those Jesuits had gotten hold of me) but then this isn’t about me. All these men searching for mammies, what can I say other than sorry about my gender, and thank Yahweh that I am a cis-gender homo (can I call myself that anymore?).
I think you can tell that I have arrived at the point that I am at, now, not at all sure what I am, or am not, permitted to call myself. I fear that I, at last, know what and who I am, but I am not at all sure if being that is acceptable in an evolving world. Luckily, we will all be dead soon enough. Now that’s something to really look forward to for the terminally bewildered. I like the idea of ‘A Death’ as the inflection point of this ‘Comedy’ we are constructing. I have that funny death story to tell yet properly. That one where Jeffrey suddenly shot upright, screaming at his parents who were quibbling over what to watch on the TV. He screamed fiercely at them “I’m dying, I get to choose the video!”. It was gloriously well said. I do love the tyranny of the dying. I do love the abject tyranny of the victim (my specialty). Feck it, I will go the whole hog. I do love tyranny. I also love saying ‘Feck’, when everyone understands that you are insinuating another vowel in the place of that ‘e’. I love that feck is proper and Irish, a softening of that blow, like a dropped ‘h’, that sort of softening and lilting.
He chose 'Singing in the Rain' and collapsed back into bed raving madly about having to make three different types of pies to prepare for some party or other in his head.
I did my job. I pressed the button and released more morphine, through the catheter in his chest, awash in the 'poor meeees'.
mea culpa, mea culpa,mea máxima culpa.
Later, I made a drawing about his wonderful, life-affirming, self-assertion. I photographed myself beside it, the drawing that is, but discovered, whilst looking at it later, that I seemed to have disappeared.
I guess that's how things go. (Secretly, I love removing myself (with photoshop), but don't tell anyone).
John: A fine eulogy, full of life.
Ruin: I want to reply to this, a little later. I might even have to go into the third person, to get a little distance from the answer, and what it means. This will be an important part of 'the book'. I am putting this here as a sort of commitment.
Anyway, to start, another extended version of this 'story' begins under this photo (the title in parentheses below) below this. It starts with “I’m dying, I get to choose the video”, about halfway down. But I now want to write something a lot more personal, a lot more 'private' perhaps. So far I have been writing about what I call the 'Wild Geese', a recognised phenomenon in Irish history and culture. Now I want to talk about something a little more close to home, and that's the cuckoo gene. That born out of desperation taking up domicile in the 'nests' of other birds, that type of 'taking over'. I think of it slightly relative to that 'banquet idea' that excess, like a pheasant being stuffed with a quail, and the quail in turn being stuffed with a starling, or any smaller bird, that decadence. Anyway, I want to look at that goose initially stuffed with a cuckoo, that idea of the self as a desperate exploiter, but also looking at it as a survival strategy, a Darwinian ploy, even. I am still brewing it in my head, so it will stutter along.
‘On Universal Innocence and The Forgiveness of Freckles’.
But back to Geese and cuckoos.
‘The Rôti Sans Pareil Is 17 Birds Stuffed Inside Each Other and It Is Delicious’. So ran the headline.
"The recipe calls for a bustard stuffed with a turkey stuffed with a goose stuffed with a pheasant stuffed with a chicken stuffed with a duck stuffed with a guinea fowl stuffed with a teal stuffed with a woodcock stuffed with a partridge stuffed with a..."
There is a sort of madness there, manifesting, perhaps, one of the reasons we don't deserve to be here at all. Not that deserving has anything to do with it anyway.
Chickenman, Wild Geese, and now Cuckoo, this sounds like I am on a type of fowl trajectory. Here's to soaring, or swansonging, or attempting both, even!
John: The cuckoo was a popular metaphor in the 1950s, quite possibly in response to the aftermath of WWII and your revival gives it greater depth. One of the explorations of Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow was the impossibly undermined reconstruction of male identity, no matter what roots they sought to revive. The cuckoo, with its echo of cuckold, the returners from war rewarded with the ghost of doubt of paternity, puts all into those same murky depths of identity which artists equally embrace or flee. As ancient mythology evidences, we have always had a need to understand and belong. Post-wars and natural disasters our need for the perceived solidity of information is greatly enhanced. Technically, having a family formed of my partner's and her ex's three daughters, I am a cuckoo.
Apart from the actual people (greatly rewarding) I have also wondered if I was defying my sense of unbelonging by consciously electing to be the cuckoo, which, unlike being an artist, is I believe a choice.
Ruin: Yes, that would be true, that returning soldier thing. I would guess it has always been the case, have soldiers not been returning since time immemorial? I didn't make the connection between cuckoo and cuckold, a 'duh!' moment for me. Of course, it is there. I particularly like the cuckold personage. If I was going by the evidence of Reddit, or wherever, cuckolding seems to be enjoying a huge revival in the fetish world currently. I would guess it was all part and parcel of dealing with the diminished, and further diminishing, male, that area of 'twixt and 'tween being generated by an excess of hormone disruptors now in the environment (in plastics and whatever). But I have a whole theory about that relative to the possibility of the human animal evolving from sexual reproduction to bifurcatory splitting, that laboratory-assisted dividing known as cloning, the copying of the self, whilst we are at that point of the Y chromosome being, apparently, at 3% of its former glory. Scientists tell us that it appears to be stable at 3%, but infinity is funny like that relative to stability.
The only place we would differ on here is that "unlike artist", which I am pretty sure we might partially agree on anyway. I don't see making art (or writing, even), any form of communication really, as a 'choice'. I see it both as an instinct and a compulsion, and for the most part a disruptive nuisance, an itch. I would have to fight very hard to resist it, that scratching called art making or communicating. I would have to go totally against my 'natural' self.
But this is something I will continue to work out until I no longer can, compulsively, this awful/wonderful itch. I like writing here, simply because it is immediate communication, and sometimes the feedback like yours is invaluable. There is this idea that writing needs to be done alone, like art, but I don't think that is necessarily 'true'. I think you have to work it out the best way you can, and there are no rules.
When I quote you, should I call you John Seven, or just John? I have been calling you John, but thought I should ask. As in "John: A fine eulogy, full of life." Would you prefer John Seven?
John: Well, I don't know what went wrong with my sentence construction there, as I intended to state that artist is not a choice (nor a guarantee of quality). Now amended. Regarding my name - John used to be the skinhead universal form of address, as in "Y'want bovver Jon?"
It was also, in the the year I was born, the Mohamed, It was also, in the year I was born, the Mohamed, Muhammad, Muhamad, or Mohammad of its day, the most common male name in the world. In its many forms - Ian, Iain, Ifan, Sean, Shaun, Shane, Jens, Jean, Joan, Johan and so on.
I am happy with whatever you choose.
Ruin: I guessed we were on the same page relative to art, or writing, this 'fever' to communicate is uncontrollable. It’s not a choice at all. But I feel the same about this cuckoo behaviour and this catfishing too. I see them both as survival manoeuvres, generated mostly out of desperation. Anyway, that's the point I will be starting from for this 'chapter'. I will be using the text generated here, and pulling it through the pronoun mangle, writing it in the third person, to get some distance, some overview.
Blimey, he realised, his behaviour had been stark raving cuckoo. He found it as difficult to think about as to write about this, but felt in the writing of it, that some liberation might be found there. The working out of it was going to have to be in the present, but there would be references and stories that harked back to his ‘Wild Goose’ history, his wandering, his running away. He knew too that he was going to have to stop playing with words, stop trying to entertain, this was not the way to go. By this he meant that “meself” as opposed to myself, that ‘cod Irish’, that “at all, at all”. That would naturally fall away anyway, as he moved away from childhood, as he learnt to speak, to communicate, even. His leaving Ireland was, in a way, his learning to talk. Before that period, he had been that oft-described stuttering, nervous entity, floundering between church-generated guilt and maintaining his secret—that abuse, that incest, that familial interference that could only serve to completely sunder him from family, and any semblance of security, of a feeling of belonging or of ever having been nurtured. It was nobody’s fault. Those who haven’t been nurtured have no idea how to nurture, and similarly those who have never been protected have no way of knowing how to proffer protection. Both his parents had, in their turn, been abandoned as children. It was all they knew. This was somehow part and parcel of the history of that emerald island, that history of hundreds of years of abuse. That this abuse caused Irish literature to blossom, in that foreign tongue, English, is one of those creative offshoots of abuse, one of those ‘miracles’, as his mother used to say, describing anything good or beneficial, a silver lining around those multi-generational deadening clouds.
He was angry, sad, and excited when he discovered that he had to leave to survive, that he had to give up everything and everyone he had ever known, and set out alone for that pagan land on the other side of the Irish Sea. Looking back, he liked that this cuckoo also described a sort of madness; other than the survival instinct it became somewhat renowned for, it also described that ‘stark raving’ idea, that there had always been this connection we humans make about this misunderstood creature, and its development of certain Darwinian characteristics generated by its struggle to survive.
Stealing somewhat from the title of the book by Mr Foster Wallace (of the multiple footnotes on footnotes), he suspected that he had come to that point where he might, at last, ‘Consider the Cuckoo’.
John: This riffing on a thought, expanding out to discover surprises and similarities is a thing of wonder.
Ruin: It's a bit strange to be working it out in 'real time' here. I am literally working it through in my head as I write it. It becomes a self-justification, of sorts, I guess. I will tie it in, somehow, to the main theme. I am coming out of that chapter which has to do with childhood, and heading towards London, via a year in Liverpool—that age-old Irish route—through Aristophanes' The Birds, from which the expression 'Cloud Cuckoo Land' comes, through Mr Darwin, on the way towards New York, and 'Rack and Ruin'.
But yes, he was heading for ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’, only inasmuch as it was to be totally unfamiliar; there was the madness there of difference, a way of thinking that was foreign to everything he knew. The old rules just didn’t apply, but there were also new rules to learn.
On Universal Order
Or blessed lack thereof.
Dear Rack,
I suspect we have both had our moments with each other, compassionate and understanding, and the opposite. I have never felt particularly worthy, but that’s a universal, some dreadful leftover from a hideously insecure childhood, neglectful parents, an absent alcoholic father and an abusive uncle—all that palaver, that stuff of amateur melodrama, probably endemic, commonplace even, on that little emerald jewel called ‘home’. The thing is, or the pedestrian tragedy is, that you don’t really realise what you are carrying with you when you set off into the world alone; when you put on your walking shoes, you have no idea what your coping mechanisms are, how skew-whiff they might be relative to a world out there, a place that has most likely generated another type of abuse, a foreign variant, one which you have no experience of at all. It’s not unlike our beloved Omicron, another spiked battering ram, something that you might survive or not.
Yes, it’s the same old same old, those ‘Wild Geese’ setting off, full of youthful energy and dreams of conquest, already weighed down by their own undoing. Compassion was easy for me when we met. You had, apparently, fallen at the first hurdle, or so it seemed. I was very wrong about that. Wrecked Rack was phoenix-like. I didn’t know that then, though that constant re-igniting can work a certain ruin on the old cadaver. I notice a chemical smell in my urine, and I was wondering if you do too. We are now part chemical; a bit like our beloved de Selby’s part bicycle, part human. We have been absorbing chemicals now for decades, and you even two decades more than I have. One cannot help but wonder how they have an effect on our very DNA, our day-to-day thoughts, our moods and our hopes, or despairs. But, butt, chicken butt, as I like to say, I have decided to make their influence positive. We are a hybrid, a new man and woman, a chemically enhanced super-breed of survivors.
How’s that for famous last words?
We are like no one else, though this is true of everyone. Now we have the added input of our screens, our hard-drives and external devices, all brain-enhancers and exploitable. These are our external memories, as that innate ability to remember slopes off, and it’s nothing less than a frigging ‘Universal Superhighway’. Nobody has had that before, though I would question as to whether this is a recurring phenomenon, forgotten but recurring, on an infinite, ever-expanding loop (call me loopy). Heloise and Abelard could have done with a bit of that, but they managed anyway, so how can we not rape and pillage the universe with this magnificent, unimaginable tool at our disposal? The only thing that holds us back is our massive insecurity, and our excuses. But the proffering of these to each other, the unashamed exposing of them, is the beginning of this Knausgaardian ‘struggle’, and we have been doing this for almost 30 years. We have the capacity to cross-germinate, to percolate Sontag’s ‘Camp’ through Knausgaard’s, and the other tyrant’s, ‘Kampf’—that tragedy and camp comedy combined. I would like a little more of that ‘fun’ back, the laughing at the absurdity of it all combined with the realisation of what we wrought, and how blindly reactive it was, and we were.
It would be wonderful to laugh, and scream, together again.
"But I wonder if you share my feeling that to write anything sufficiently accurate and engaging, and actually get it over all the hurdles of publication, and risk the ultimate disappointment of remaindering ... Oh, I could not do it now."
No, I have no intention of 'publishing', or even presenting what I am writing and thinking about, other than on Flickr. I find that I do things in 4-year tranches. The idea is just to sort out some of the mess I made, that cacophony of images I generated whilst trying to understand.
I am looking for where I didn't manage to communicate, although some of it ended up in museums (with appropriate puffing out of chest). A 4-year tranche is a challenge, a challenge because of age and the dragging of another 'fatal' disease along with one through a pandemic. Blissfully, science has intervened yet again, somewhat offering respite, temporarily, from the Horsemen. I got that second AstraZeneca yesterday, but am still jealous of those enjoying the intervention of the mRNA vaccines into the livestream of their DNA. If we are going to be so interfered with in that way, I want to be one of the first on that cutting edge of the glorious new Science religion (that I love)! I would have loved to have been the Musk of death, that space pioneer and not the smell. Although, one appears to have missed that boat, along with many others, for now. But there is an acute awareness of their fetlocks and broomsticks—of those aforementioned Horsemen, that is, and their Woo and Woe.
Publishers, Bookshops, Museums and Galleries are over. Didn't you get the memo?
At the same time, that remainder bin is essential. It is, more or less, where we all end up, the good and the bad, those who write with clarity and those who lick and salve their purple wounds in public.
You know that I love purple, in a hate purple sort of way. Don't start me on Orange.