Various butterflies mud-puddling in the Kaeng Krachan National Park, Thailand. In flight is a common bluebottle.

Wikipedia: Graphium sarpedon, the common bluebottle or blue triangle in Australia, is a species of swallowtail butterfly that is found in South and Southeast Asia, as well as eastern Australia. There are approximately sixteen subspecies with differing geographical distributions.

Mud-puddling, or simply puddling, is a behavior most conspicuous in butterflies, but occurs in other animals as well, mainly insects; they seek out nutrients in certain moist substances such as rotting plant matter, mud and carrion and they suck up the fluid.

"Mud walking (in Dutch: wadlopen) is an exciting and adventurous way of acquainting oneself with a unique nature reserve, the Wadden Sea, also the largest continuous national park in Europe. During low-tide, shallows fall dry making it possible to cross the bottom of the sea.

These shallows consist of sandbanks, criss-crossed with trenches and gullies. During a typical mud walk, hikers wrestle through miles of mire and thigh-deep brown mud, wade through channels of waist high water before arriving on one of the islands in the Wadden Sea."

info-internet

Make sure you have a guided tour and only when the weather conditions are right!

For now it was nice to make a very short walk ;-)) The Wadden Sea is such a great place to visit if you love nature and silence.

Happy monochrome Thursday !

This Western Sandpiper steps through the mud, looking for food. Its bill is muddy too, showing plenty of dredging through the mud for the bivalves they love to eat which are right at the surface.

Taken 7 May 2021 at Homer, Alaska.

Müder Blick der kleinen Nilgans

Mud-puddling is a feeding behaviour displayed by butterflies. Although they primarily feed on nectar they seek out other essential nutrients including minerals and amino acids in moist substances such as rotting plant matter and mud. Where the conditions are suitable, butterflies form aggregations while mud-puddling.

There are six species of butterflies in this photo taken at Phnom Kulen National Park, Cambodia. I have identified two species. The large butterflies are yellow helens, Papilio nephelus. The white butterfly in flight is the same as the yellow and white butterflies with a dark edge at the edge of their wings. They are chocolate albatrosses, Appias lyncida.

Thanks for visiting. I am very grateful to those who take the time to comment or fave.

Biegus krzywodzioby/Curlew Sandpiper/Calidris ferruginea

Die kleine Nilgans seht sehr Müde aus.

A black-necked stilt probes the mud at the Merced National Wildlife Refuge.

Yellowstone NP

Wyoming USA

HCS 😊😊😍

CLICHELIST

www.clichelist.net/clear-as-mud/

Thank you for your kind visit. Have a wonderful and beautiful day! xo💜💜 💕💕💕❤️❤️❤️

Something different today....

Many swallows built these impressive and unique mud nests on one side of Yellowstone's Soda Butte.

For some reason they didn't stick around to pose for me....

Soda Butte in comments.

Thanks for taking a look! Always appreciated.

I found this beautiful Blue Mud Dauber in my front yard today. Photographed in Maryland.

Up on a mountain trail with weather moving through.

Mud Creek Falls, Sky Valley, GA

Yeovil Country Park

Section of The River Hull that flows into the River Humber that is so badly silted up,

The twin keels keep her upright until she refloats on the high tide. At first glance this looks like a 'Colin Archer' clinker-built day boat; closer inspection reveals its a modern fibreglass construction but she's very pretty all the same! Taken with Polaroid SX-70 Alpha 1 on Polaroid (TIP) B&W film at Sunderland Point, River Lune, Lancashire.

After spending the day at the Knoxville Zoo, far from home, it was nice to get back into my old stomping ground, and bring my friend back to experience nature in a different way. This of course is one of the elk I have been documenting for the past few years with my photography, strong, proud, antlers not symmetrical, and in this case, covered in mud. I managed to miss the large animal thrashing in the mud puddle, though the ranger I stopped to talk to gave me a full account. Of course this individual was apparently giddy for the rut a bit early, and was making a bit of a scene, despite that, I gathered my wits about me, and began capturing fresh images.

Aperture: f8

ISO: 800

SS: 1/250th

Focal: 560mm

Fujinon 100-400mm TC 1.4X

Read More At:

www.blackthornephoto.com

Insta360 X5.

Out in the woods of Georgia is Sky Valley, a somewhat fancy leisure community and golf course that seems out of place. When you enter Sky Valley, it seems like any waterfalls would have disappeared with the buildup of the community, but off in a corner of Sky Valley is Mud Creek Falls. It’s actually a very pretty waterfall that is easy to access and even has a little picnic area next to it.

Another from the Saturday outing with John Cothron. This is Mud Creek Falls in Georgia's highest city, Sky Valley.

What you get when walking around in a muddy cow pasture, Mud Socks as shown by this Canada Goose (Branta canadensis)

The people who lived in this place don't know what their situation was like, but I think their lives were simple and happy ♥️

If you're happy and you know it sling some mud! Elephant cooling down with a mud bath.

Some really tragic stories of people getting stuck and dying in these mud flats by Anchorage.

This is one of those moments I wished I had a drone...

I love the many patterns that are created in mud and sand in all it's stages, wet, dried and cracked, flowing patterns. I can get lost for hours. These mud formations caught my attention because of how the sky was reflected in the wet areas. Artistic liberty taken to enhance it. :)

I can spend days appreciating the varied landscape of the desert. One place that I yearn to visit, any opportunity I get, is the Death Valley National Park. It’s easy to get lost in its vast beauty and takes some time to see the infinite lines, curves, cracks, and textures. The fun thing with mud cracks is, move your camera slightly, and you have a completely different composition. If it’s helpful, when I point my camera over the cracks, I look for a prominent shape as a focal point and use the surrounding lines to create a visual flow leading towards the background.

Enjoying low tide.

A colour photograph.

The small fractures in the mud are caused by ice crystals which melt as soon as the temperature gets above freezing.

Twelfth picture of the series Canes & Mud.

(Just the next day of previous photoshoot, I tryed another time for take longer exposures. For this shot I wanted to guide with the light of dawn on the boat in the foreground)

Magical sunrise in this beautiful place that is the Albufera of Valencia.

The image title is because during the photoshoot, surrounded by all this beauty, calm water, boat, reeds, mud, tranquility, flying birds ... every moment reminded me a lot to the great novel "Cañas y Barro" of the great Valencian writer Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, set in rural Valencia (Albufera) of the early twentieth century, the novel observes and portrays the social reality of the time and place with absolute precision.

Would like to thank this picture to my friend Javier Girbés, which helped me a lot with the location and encouraged me to know this magnificent spot.

On the technical side, say that I only used a neutral gradient three steps filter.

I hope you like it. Have a nice Thursday. :)

My galleries:

Flickr: www.flickr.com/photos/112711738@N06/

500px: www.500px.com/dasanes77

Facebook: www.facebook.com/dasanes77

Instagram: @dasanes77

© Copyright: The reproduction, publication, modification, transmission or exploitation of any work contained herein for any use, personal or commercial, without my prior written permission is strictly prohibited.

Photographed in Oakdale, Minnesota, January 9, 2023.

Mud, Glorious Mud!!

Green-winged Teal dabbling on the mudflats at E B Forsythe NWR, NJ on 1/23/2020

2020_01_23_EOS 7D Mark II_2931-Edit_V1

Redshank hunting in the early morning mud at Thornham harbour in Norfolk.