View allAll Photos Tagged Behaviour
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/
September 13, 2024: Set as the group cover photo for the “Nature photo passion” Flickr group.
This is a wild animal, not part of the sanctuary's collection.
From Wikipedia:
The Australian water dragon (Intellagama lesueurii), which includes the eastern water dragon (Intellagama lesueurii lesueurii ) and the Gippsland water dragon (Intellagama lesueurii howittii ) subspecies, is an arboreal agamid species native to eastern Australia from Victoria northwards to Queensland. There may be a small introduced population on the south-east coast of South Australia. The Gippsland Water Dragon is generally the more southern of the two species and the more cold adapted and heat sensitive. Visually distinguishing the Gippsland Water Dragon from the Eastern Water Dragon is relatively easy, as long as their skin is reasonably clean and not stained from the water, as identification of the two subspecies depends largely on observable differences in colours and patterns.
Australian water dragons are extremely shy in the wild, but readily adapt to continual human presence in suburban parks and gardens. They are fast runners and strong climbers. When faced with a potential predator, they seek cover in thick vegetation, or drop from an overhanging branch into water. They are able to swim totally submerged, and rest on the bottom of shallow creeks or lakes for up to 90 minutes, to avoid detection.
Both males and females display typical agamid behaviour such as basking, arm-waving and head-bobbing. Fast arm-waving signals dominance, while slow arm-waving signals submission. Males are territorial, and in areas of higher population density, males exhibit displays of aggression toward other males including posturing, chasing and fighting.
I observed this Foxes behaviour while it followed its prey under the snow. Jumping up and then down and digging under the snow, while being followed by an opportunistic Magpie to the left of the image.
Foxes are, in visual terms, arrhythmic (or 24-hour) mammals, meaning they can be active at any time, day or night (compare this to most squirrels, who are almost totally blind at night and can only be active during daylight). There are several adaptations that allow for this activity pattern; all help control the amount of light available to the animal.
Foxes, unlike most canids, have vertically-slit pupils, which provide them with three significant advantages over hunters with round pupils. Primarily, vertically slit pupils can be closed more tightly than rounded ones and this, in conjunction with eyelids that close horizontally, allows their owner to more precisely regulate the amount of light entering the eye, helping them hunt across a wide variety of different light conditions.
Photo taken in downtown Reykjavík.
P.S. Many of those people are foreign visitors.
Tourism to Iceland has formally exploded in the years after the famous volcanic eruption in the glacier Eyjafjallajökull, which caused delays in flight all over North and Western Europe. Foreign tourism has remained at an extreme level; today more than a million tourists visit Iceland yearly, while the population is only about 330.000 - was around 200 thousand a decade and a half ago.
I found these two trees while walking in a local forest park. The pair looked out of place in amongst the conifers, especially with the larger tree apparently reaching out a spindly almost threatening “hand” while looming over the smaller timid looking tree........ strange what tricks your mind plays on you while alone in the forest 😆.
Red Squirrel ('Tamiascurius hudsonicus") breeding may occur twice a year. Their courtship is a rough and tumble affair!
Images created on July 18, 2025 at Lakes of Two Rivers, Algonquin Provincial Park.
Two curious little black lambs - fascinated by the strange behaviour of humans... not surprised - I'm puzzled myself :o)
Jerusalem residents were greeted with a rare snowfall Friday when a storm dumped 10 inches on the city.
Historically, the city sees an average of just four inches a year!
Interesting behaviour. These Hoopoes were chattering and displaying while the same time feeding their nestlings in hole of a tree. The green wood hoopoe is a cooperative breeder and common resident in most of sub-Saharan Africa. It is found in groups of up to a dozen or so birds with only one breeding pair. The breeding female lays two to four blue eggs in a natural tree hole or old barbet nest and incubates them for about 18 days. On hatching, she and the nestlings are fed by the rest of the group, even after they have fledged and left the nest hole. The group is fearless in defence of the nestlings against intruders.
A small group of Oystercatchers flew overhead and were showing signs of coming in for a landing in this spot, yelling continuously. These two were having none of it, and responded by doing some yelling of their own, repeatedly alternating between holding their heads high and then bowing down. The small flock went away after much screeching and never did land here.
Yes, that is it's full name! In this pic it is displaying - which is apparently quite unusual behaviour for late summer/early autumn. What is really different about this Wagtail is that it's tail doesn't wag up and down - it wags side to side - most odd!!
Juvenile
Brown Thrasher BRTH (Toxostoma rufum)
tentatively or
experimentally feeding
Carmichael, Saskatchewan, Canada
DSCN9636
******
Mike McGrenere found one in Greater Victoria July 11th...Great Find Mike!
The western rosella (Platycercus icterotis), or moyadong, is a species of parrot endemic to southwestern Australia. The head and underparts are bright red, and the back is mottled black; a yellow patch at the cheek distinguishes it from others of the genus Platycercus. Adults of the species exhibit sexual dimorphism with the females duller overall; juveniles lack the striking colours of mature birds and the characteristic patterning is not as easily distinguished. Their communication call is a softly delivered pink-pink sound, and much of their behaviour is comparatively unobtrusive. Their habitat is in eucalypt forests and woodlands, where they often remain unobserved until they appear to feed on seeds at nearby cleared areas.
A quick capture before I adjusted the camera settings, surprised to get it at 1/40sec inbuilt image stabilization worked well, funny turned out to be the best one.
The normal behaviour for emerald wasps (aka cuckoo wasps) is to never be still. They dart around all the time which makes them difficult to shoot - something which is unfortunate with their amazingly coloured armour.
This one which I found at the bee hotel in the garden was a little different. She was watching a solitary wasp crawl into one of the holes and prepare it for her egg/larvae.
Emerald wasps are kleptoparasites and this one was staying still outside the hole, planning to dart in there and place her own egg and take advantage of the other wasp's hard work.
She stayed still for sevaral minutes - but I can't say she was diffucult to spot with such a rainbow of colours.
There was a wire mesh in front of the logs to prevent birds from making a smörgåsbord out of it, but I managed to shoot through the holes of it and just reach the wasp with the focus at the maximum available distance (this lens can't focus further away than 101 mm / 4").
There are several very similar-looking species in the Chrysis ignita complex, but the best guess my expert has come up with was Chrysis schencki with a big maybe in front of it.
Part 1 here: www.flickr.com/photos/tinyturtle/52200547686/
Always entertaining to watch but once you see them coming together you've missed it, just managed to spot the build up with this pair.
St Aidan's Nature Park.
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.
This Robin appeared to be trying to attract attention to itself by fluttering its wings in short bursts without taking off, like a young fledgling would do to get fed by a parent bird. I was grateful that it kept repeating this behaviour, so I could take the shot.
LBG, Caspian Gull and Common Gull juvenile; the first one scared, the second one attacing and the last one fleeing.
Wings open with loud scream and full ahead; such aggressive behaviour is said to be typical for Caspians (C. Gribbins et al). Herrings doesn´t act like that. Wonder where they´ve learned such manners?
Note the dark, peppered iris of the Caspian.
You can also pay attention to colouring of it´s primaries (what´s left of them; 10, 9, 8).
Selkälokki, Aroharmaalokki ja Kalalokki
Lake Suontee, Southern Savonia, Finland
Picture taken 2016-08-25
Shorebirds of Ireland, Freshwater Birds of Ireland and The Birds of Ireland: A Field Guide with Jim Wilson.
www.markcarmodyphotography.com
The Great Cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo) is a widespread member of the cormorant family of seabirds. It breeds in much of the Old World and the Atlantic coast of North America. In European waters it can be distinguished from the Common Shag by its larger size, heavier build, thicker bill, lack of a crest and plumage without any green tinge. In eastern North America, it is similarly larger and bulkier than Double-crested Cormorant, and the latter species has more yellow on the throat and bill. Great Cormorants are mostly silent, but they make various guttural noises at their breeding colonies.
Many fishermen see in the Great Cormorant a competitor for fish. Because of this it was nearly hunted to extinction in the past. Thanks to conservation efforts its numbers increased.
Cormorant fishing is practiced in China, Japan, and elsewhere around the globe. In it, fishermen tie a line around the throats of cormorants, tight enough to prevent swallowing, and deploy them from small boats. The cormorants catch fish without being able to fully swallow them, and the fishermen are able to retrieve the fish simply by forcing open the cormorants' mouths, apparently engaging the regurgitation reflex.
In North Norway, cormorants are traditionally seen as semi-sacred. (wikipedia)
There are many Cormorants that fish along the shoreline of Dublin Bay. This adult was coming into the base of the east pier, Dun Laoghaire, Dublin.
These guys were not playing, the dust they were kicking up , the heat haze off the path, plus a large crop, messed with things here, as did having to quickly drop to one knee and hand hold., these excuses aside, worth sharing I thought.
Taken at RSPB Titchwell, on the main path, MORE IN THE SERIES BELOW IN COMMENTS
Canon EOS-1D X
ƒ/10.0
700.0 mm
1/5000
iso 1250
Crestie photographed at my woodland site in the Scottish Highlands. I offer both guided and unguided photography sessions here Nov-Mar. Please contact me for details.
This Robin swayed and rocked from side to side for quite a while (minutes at least) with puffed feathers and beak slightly opened, displaying to another one sitting just above it. Amazing behaviour to witness. Had never seen this before.
The Weasel's curious behaviour suddenly became a little clearer when it re-emerged from the deeper vegetation carrying one of it's young.
Having seen footage on tv programs about Weasels and Stoats moving their young from one den site to another it was quite an engrossing experience to get to watch it play out for real in front of you.