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The greater flamingo (Phoenicopterus roseus) is the most widespread and largest species of the flamingo family. It is found in Africa, on the Indian subcontinent, in the Middle East, and in southern Europe.
This is the largest species of flamingo, averaging 110–150 cm (43–59 in) tall and weighing 2–4 kg (4.4–8.8 lb). The largest male flamingos have been recorded at up to 187 cm (74 in) tall and 4.5 kg (9.9 lb). It is closely related to the American flamingo and Chilean flamingo, with which it has sometimes been considered conspecific.
Subadult with gray white coloration
Like all flamingos, this species lays a single chalky-white egg on a mud mound. Most of the plumage is pinkish white, but the wing coverts are red and the primary and secondary flight feathers are black. The bill is pink with a restricted black tip, and the legs are entirely pink. The call is a goose-like honking.
Subadult flamingos are whitish grey and only attain the pink coloration several years into their adult life. The coloration comes from the carotenoid pigments in the organisms that live in their feeding grounds. Secretions of the uropygial gland also contain carotenoids. During the breeding season, greater flamingos increase the frequency of their spreading uropygial secretions over their feathers and thereby enhance their color. This cosmetic use of uropygial secretions has been described as applying "make-up".
The bird resides in mudflats and shallow coastal lagoons with salt water. Using its feet, the bird stirs up the mud, then sucks water through its bill and filters out small shrimp, seeds, blue-green algae, microscopic organisms, and mollusks. The greater flamingo feeds with its head down, and its upper jaw is movable and not rigidly fixed to its skull.
For more information, please visit en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_flamingo
Trumpeter Swans are impressively large—males average over 26 pounds, making them North America’s heaviest flying bird. To get that much mass aloft the swans need at least a 100 meter-long “runway” of open water: running hard across the surface, they almost sound like galloping horses as they generate speed for take off.
Starting in the 1600s, market hunters and feather collectors had decimated Trumpeter Swans populations by the late 1800s. Swan feathers adorned fashionable hats, women used swan skins as powder puffs, and the birds’ long flight feathers were coveted for writing quills. Aggressive conservation helped the species recover by the early 2000s.
from allaboutbirds.org
(Aquila audax)
Santa Teresa Rd - Alice Springs - NT
Austrália
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All my photos are now organized into sets by the country where they were taken, by taxonomic order, by family, by species (often with just one photo for the rarer ones), and by the date they were taken.
So, you may find:
- All the photos for this trip Austrália (2024) (309)
- All the photos for this order ACCIPITRIFORMES (302)
- All the photos for this family Accipitridae (Accipitrídeos) (277)
- All the photos for this species Aquila audax (1)
- All the photos taken this day 2024/11/13 (11)
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12 to 18 inches
The average stitch length is 2.5mm.
Generally, skirts, dresses, and coats have wider hems (2 to 3 inches or 5 to 7.5 cm)
Don’t make me do Math when I’m tired. It’s not fair!
“If I only could. I’d make a deal with God and I’d get him to swap our places” (I like my lyric better)
Children is an irregular plural, not a regular one.
Therefore, the suffix is 's , and the possessive form is children's
Apparently, just a spoonful.
I took too many but medicine tastes awful.
Are you putting your head directly into those buckets? It matters….
Or, is it more of a full body immersion in caffeine kind of experience?
People are into a lot of weird things these days!
Male sea otters live between 10 and 15 years, while females live slightly longer, from 15 to 20 years.
Lucky otters, I wonder if spinning helps elongate their lifespans!
How many years do they spend feeling dizzy…that’s another thing I wonder about.
Arctic Ocean/Max depth is 17,881′
When the mother and father wolves stay together, their babies live longer.
Some live long enough to go to Wolf University and live to be the professors of otters
Some wolves like peanut butter so much that
One wolf started a band and named it Peanut Butter Wolf!
I think actually it could depend on the length of the song.
28 is the number of dinosaurs found in Argentina.
They have names like Abelisaurus and Alvarezsaurus.
All the children I don’t have would likely be named something like this and might hate me forever.
Altogether, there are over 50,000 Hanzi characters.
Many of them are quite friendly and memorable.
They would make strong novel protagonists!
Oh, that’s right, it was Fritz Lang!
Hard to define…on the tip of my tongue….
but it depends on the size of the dish
Are you a super taster, anyway?
Dolphins surpass humans by recognizing themselves at 7mo. (humans are 12 mo.)
Is anyone really all that surprised?
July 17, 1954. She’s a Cancer but hopefully doesn’t have Cancer.
16 plays but you only the remember the ones where
the gun appears early on.
Manuever.
40 humans with tails. Many more wish they were cats, though.
There are 7,500 varieties of apples in existence throughout the world
I can name at least ten.
Saying ti·nuh·tuhs makes my ears ring.
What kind of olives are you looking for in Seville, Spain because they can actually get pricey
Point your right index finger towards your head and then move both of your hands in front of you round and round
Like you are caressing a very small world in your hands
1,010,450 days to build Rome
So, the people who started building it never got to see it finished.
But, I bet they didn’t imagine it would ever get destroyed.
Who knows, maybe they also never conceived of its temporary greatness
They were all a part of
"Dividing the potential energy of the pyramid by 450 kJ implies that
It took 5.3 million man-days to raise the pyramid.
If a work year consists of 300 days, that would mean almost 18,000 man-years, which, spread over 20 years,
implies a workforce of about 900 men.” who never got to view their work to completion either!
Cleopatra was Greek!
I know so many answers and yet,
I feel even emptier. I think it was better to imagine than to know.
These answers are based on the questions previously asked here that I was wrong about:
www.flickr.com/photos/kirstiecat/50898158236/in/dateposted/
**All photos are copyrighted**
(Platycercus elegans)
Moorook - South Australia
Austrália
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All my photos are now organized into sets by the country where they were taken, by taxonomic order, by family, by species (often with just one photo for the rarer ones), and by the date they were taken.
So, you may find:
- All the photos for this trip Austrália (2024) (309)
- All the photos for this order PSITTACIFORMES (110)
- All the photos for this family Psittaculidae (Psitaculídeos) (52)
- All the photos for this species Platycercus elegans (4)
- All the photos taken this day 2024/11/05 (12)
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The tui is a large honeyeater, 27 to 32 cm (11–13 in) in length. The Chatham Islands subspecies is larger on average than the nominate subspecies, and heavier.
Males tend to be heavier than females. Nominate males weigh between 65–150 g (2.3–5.3 oz), and females 58–105 g (2.0–3.7 oz). Males of the Chatham subspecies are 89–240 g (3.1–8.5 oz) and females 89–170 g (3.1–6.0 oz).
At first glance the bird appears completely black except for a small tuft of white feathers at its neck and a small white wing patch, causing it to resemble a parson in clerical attire.
On closer inspection it can be seen that tui have brown feathers on the back and flanks, a multicoloured iridescent sheen that varies with the angle from which the light strikes them, and a dusting of small, white-shafted feathers on the back and sides of the neck that produce a lacy collar.
This image was taken in ZEALANDIA, in Wellington, on the North Island of New Zealand
White flower in the front garden of a house along Nursery Street in Hornsby - northern Sydney.
I often walk along this street as part of my mega trek from Cherrybrook to Wahroonga.
It is, I would argue, an average white flower!! It was part of a band of average white flowers in this cottage garden. But nevertheless they looked quite magical in Sydney's soft rain.
Photographed last November (2020).
The cottage garden also features white roses and white hydrangeas, and a magnificent, huge, white-flowering dogwood. It is the garden of Dorothy who has lived here for over 50 years. She and her husband brought up their daughters in this house. The house belonged to her parents before that. Circa 1920. Her husband has now been dead for 22 years but she still tends the garden.
Recently I gave her my 'Firefighter', 'Valencia' and 'Best Friend' hybrid tea-roses for the front garden. I purchased them last year but, given all my time constraints, they were still in their pots from the nursery!! But now they are in Dorothy's garden. And I will be able to pop over, as I do from time to time to keep her company, for a cup of English breakfast tea and a biscuit, and see the roses from the front porch. Dorothy is 85 years of age today - 9th August, 2021.
My Canon EOS 5D Mk IV, with the Canon f 2.8 L 100mm macro lens.
The Average White Band, of-course, is famous for its mega hit from 1975 - 'Pick Up The Pieces'. There are a number of versions.
Here are two versions:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpflST8xWm8
www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnH_zwVmiuE
But one of the best 'live' versions is by Candy Dulfer!! Very funky and cool.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgQQ7k30Ti4
The Average White Band is also renowned for their hit 'Cut The Cake'.
Processed in C1
28 mm equiv. (wide)
Exp. Corr. Value: +0.0 EV
Exp. Program: Normal
Metering mode: Centre Weighted Average
WB Settings: Auto
It just now struck me, that in 2019 I only uploaded two pieces of mine. Lizard portraits both. Which means, I did not get better about keeping up with Flickr, as I had intended. I got worse! As a silver lining I already have three completely edited shots on stand-by, so that it's pretty unlikely that this year will be quite as bad (he said in his youthful naiveté). All of them are first-time species for me to present. So here's to the roaring twenties of the twenty-first and good light to you all!
So let's start 2020 with a shot taken in the Summer of 2018. I was staying with my family up north for a couple of weeks and hadn't had much luck with my subjects due to the extreme heat. I had actually planned to return from the north the day before but due to the almostlegendary capacity of German Railways for complications and my incapacity for being bothered to deal with the fallout I postponed my departure for another couple of days. Good thing I did!
One of the very first snakes I ever saw as a young child was an adder my uncle had somehow caught in a Coke bottle during a picknick and brought to my father because he did not know what to do with it. A beautiful high contrast male, so light in it's greys to almost be completely black and white. Since I started wildlife photography I have often been able to observe adders in theire natural habitat. Though I've never been able to produce any shots I felt worthy of being presented. I also never had seen a baby adder until that day. This little guy, close in size to your average earthworm, given the date, could not have been more than a couple of days old. I was struck by just how tiny it was, potential food for any thrush or blackbird. As juveniles adders are not yet sexually dimorphic in their colour pattern, so maybe this one will stay brown or turn to the gorgeous grey-black pattern that first impressed me all those years ago (as for this well surveyed
population there are no cases of melanism on record).
PS: I had to clone and stamp some highly distracting bright particles of detritus on the snakes body. If any traces of my editing leap out at you, please let me know so I can retouch.
An average sunset turned magical in the minutes to half hour after. Here I couldn't get the height I wanted with my tripod and, with the sky changing rapidly, I thought it time to test the combined IBIS of the EM1-II and the 12-100mm F4. I balanced on top of the first pylon, held my breath, anchored the camera against my head squeezed the shutter and held for six seconds.
I think it's probably sharp enough and a winner under the circumstances. If I printed it you would have to stand nose against the paper to see it's not totally sharp.
So I abandoned the tripod and grabbed several handheld shots in the range of 1 to 3 seconds. All of those are completely sharp. This extraordinary VR (the lens and body both have VR and work together for extra stops of VR) will be genuinely liberating in many seashore situations because some are precarious and require quick set up and shoot.
Peaking out. We're still not finished with winter here though. There is much prediction of when the last frost will appear. The earliest last frost dates range from Feb 5 to 16. The last frost dates range from Apr 23 to 25. The average last frost date for this area is around March 30. Some predict it as March 23. Much confidence and much inaccuracy.
Not your average 10-pin
Hi all,
I’m adding my soapbox to this post.
Currently I am avoiding groups with big gaudy awards — IMHO, they could be adequately replaced by just the name of the group, maybe in bold and a colour. Those big graphics take up a lot of space in the comments, are distracting, and most likely chew up too much bandwidth. (How about a movement to rid Flickr of them ?)
Also, I am not posting to groups where you have to award x number of other posts for every one of yours. This just creates situations where one is making awards just to fill a quota. I rather award images that I find appealing and that I admire.
Would love to hear comments of others.
PLEASE: Do not post any comment graphics.
The average goldfinch is 12–13 cm (4.7–5.1 in) long with a wingspan of 21–25 cm (8.3–9.8 in) and a weight of 14 to 19 g (0.49 to 0.67 oz). The sexes are broadly similar, with a red face, black and white head, warm brown upperparts, white underparts with buff flanks and breast patches, and black and yellow wings.
On closer inspection male goldfinches can often be distinguished by a larger, darker red mask that extends just behind the eye. In females, the red face does not extend past the eye. The ivory-coloured bill is long and pointed, and the tail is forked. Goldfinches in breeding condition have a white bill, with a greyish or blackish mark at the tip for the rest of the year. Juveniles have a plain head and a greyer back but are unmistakable due to the yellow wing stripe. Birds in central Asia (caniceps group) have a plain grey head behind the red face, lacking the black and white head pattern of European and western Asian birds.
The song is a pleasant silvery twittering. The call is a melodic tickeLIT, and the song is a pleasant tinkling medley of trills and twitters, but always including the trisyllabic call phrase or a teLLIT-teLLIT-teLLIT.
2021 was another year of above average forest fires. Surprisingly in Vancouver we only experienced one week when smoke drifting in from the interior of the province impacted the local air quality.
3 shots of the filtered sun effect. First, smoky sun reflection on East False Creek water.
Tp date, 2021 is the third most destructive wildfire season on record in the province, after updated statistics showed more than 8,580 square kilometres of land has been burned so far..
British Columbia appears on track for another potentially record-setting wildfire season.
The worst wildfire seasons in B.C.'s history were 2018 (nearly 13,550 square kilometres burned) and 2017 (more than 12,160 square kilometres).
One source says the Nyenchen Tanglha Mountains range is about 1,000 km (620 mi) in length. Its highest point is 7,090 m (23,260 ft) located 100 km (62 mi) to the northwest of Lhasa. The range is parallel to the Himalayas in the Transhimalayas, and north of the Brahmaputra River. [3] Another source says the Nyenchen Tanglha Mountains extend 460 miles (740 km) from Nyêmo County in the west to Ranwu County (the southwestern part of Baxoi County) in the east.
Its highest peak is Mount Nyenchen Tanglha (Nyainqêntanglha Feng) at 7,162 metres (23,497 ft).[4]
The southern side of the Nyenchen Tanglha Mountains is precipitous, and falls by around 2,000 metres (6,600 ft), while the northern side is fairly level and descends about 1,000 metres (3,300 ft). Most of the mountains are below 6,500 metres (21,300 ft).[5] They contain 7080 glaciers covering an area of 10,700 square kilometres (4,100 sq mi).[4]
The Nyenchen Tanglha Mountains have an average latitude of 30°30'N and a longitude between 90°E and 97°E. Together with the Gangdise Shan located further west, it forms the Transhimalaya [a] which runs parallel to the Himalayas north of the Yarlung Tsangpo River.
The Drukla Chu river rises in the Nyenchen Tanglha Mountains, where it is called the Song Chu river, and joins the Gyamda Chu river. The combined rivers run about 100 kilometres (62 mi) southeast to the Yarlung Tsangpo river.
Another of yesterdays crane fly emerging from the water. Here you can see its old shell under the reservoirs surface. Amazing how much they expand as they change from an aquatic insect to their short lived flying form. I was quite surprised by just how much effort it takes them to break through the surface tension.
Your average southern summer frog strangler is drenching the Mississippi Export Railroad's daily southbound freight near Agricola, Mississippi. The freshly painted GP38-2 67 leads GP50 68 on what is a now typical Saturday AM run for this train. The rainy conditions made a shot that is often on the wrong side of the sun attainable this day.
Thanks for looking!
It is hard to believe that the Great Blue Heron with it's 6 foot wingspan, on average, weighs 6 pounds.
They are 150 metres (490 ft) wide and 23 metres (75 ft) high. In the winter months, the average water flow is 250 m3/s (8,800 cu ft/s), while in the summer, the average water flow is 600 m3/s (21,000 cu ft/s). The highest flow ever measured was more than 1,250 cubic metres per second (44,000 cu ft/s) in 1999, and the lowest, 95 cubic metres per second (3,400 cu ft/s) in 1921.
The falls cannot be climbed by fish, except by eels that are able to worm their way up over the rocks.
The Rhine Falls were formed in the last ice age, approximately 14,000 to 17,000 years ago,
by erosion-resistant rocks narrowing the riverbed.
The first glacial advances created today's landforms approximately 500,000 years ago.
Up to the end of the Wolstonian Stage approximately 132,000 years ago, the Rhine flowed westwards
from Schaffhausen past Klettgau. This earlier riverbed later filled up with gravel.
About 132,000 years ago the course of the river changed southwards at Schaffhausen and formed a new channel,
which also filled up with gravel. Part of the Rhine today includes this ancient riverbed.
Text from:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhine_Falls
More:
While a lot of focus is on the Cascade Green in Brantford, CN has multiple BNSF GP38-2s running around their system right now. In Oakville, BNSF 2968 (H4) is paired up with CN 4125 (Zebra), making for a very unique duo!
Happy Bench Monday...
on average 8 million tones of plastic finds it's way into the ocean each year and it never goes away, it breaks down eventually, but even then the pellets that it becomes is in turn eaten by the marine life. We need to do more than recycle, we need to stop using plastic containers and being a throw away society.
Give it some thought, don't put your lunch in a baggie, put it in a glass container. Bring a thermos of water, not a bottle, and buy beer in bottles, not cans.... :-) (due to the plastic thingy that binds them)
dashing to work now, blow it up and check out the beautiful and awful mural.
An exposure-bracketed set of five exposures, adjusted in Adobe Lightroom then combined in Photomatix using Average mode. The deeper and already once-adjusted 16-bit TIFF result (now likely with more data in highlights and shadows) then adjusted in Lightroom again.
This process preserves color as the the camera saw it, while enabling a wider range of brightness and contrast adjustments than is possible in Adobe Lightroom in a single pass, effectively "double processing" the data.
Such a process can provide benefits and extra control over any source files, not just those from lower dynamic range sensors. So while it's accurate to say it was processed with software designed for "HDR" processing, the objective was not necessarily to compensate for low dynamic range in the sensor, and the benefits are not lost on sensors measured to have high dynamic range.
Our eyes sample the scene in point samples (see eye-tracking data), adjusting exposure at every point (our irises open up and contract), and yet somehow we don't perceive the scene in a "flat" way... we perceive brightness and contrast. In some high contrast scenes, the drama experienced is simply not reflected in a simple camera exposure. It's as if the visual processing systems in our brains enhance the image. This makes complete sense: as predators, we needed to defeat the camouflage of prey, as well as detect the camouflage of predators threatening us. Our eyes are drawn to bright areas, areas of high contrast. And apparently they're enhanced (and we try to recognize patterns and familiar shapes).
So sometimes a little bit of contrast and detail enhancement makes a scene look a little more "real", a little more familiar to our perception and memory. Adobe Lightroom has Contrast, Texture, Clarity and Dehaze sliders that help, and Some HDR modes like Interior, Photographic, Natural can be useful, and they can be combined with the best single exposure edit to soften (remove) any signature look that their algorithms might create. And a simple Average operation on multiple exposures can provide the opportunity to deepen the source material to a solid 16 bits, and to take a second pass at Lightroom's adjustments.
A southbound grain train makes the pass through downtown Cartersville, Georgia with a CW44AC leader on April 14, 2016.
This image is included in 9 galleries :- 1) "MIX_02" curated by Willie Sturges, 2) "natura, solo natura!" by fabiofoni, 3) "賞心悅目的博覽館" by ggx2ggx2@kimo.com, 4) "Yellowstone National Park" by Black Diamond Images, 5) "Neue Galerie 2020 0202" by BAKAWI, 6) "Landschaft" by Michael Gschwind, 7) "Landscapes" by Süskind Dostoevsky Poe, 8) "(((O)))" by Waldgeist and 9) "placeres visuales-volumen 2" by byktor -f.d.
It is a hot spring located in the Upper Geyser Basin. Its average temperature is around 69.8 °C (157.6 °F) and is 23 feet (7 m) deep. The pool was named by Mrs E. N. McGowan, wife of Assistant Park Superintendent, Charles McGowan in 1883. She called it "Convolutus", the Latin name for the morning glory flower, which the spring resembles.
The distinct colour of the pool is due to bacteria which inhabit the water. On a few rare occasions the Morning Glory Pool has erupted as a geyser, usually following an earthquake or other nearby seismic activity. Several entryways have been clogged due to objects being thrown in by tourists, reducing the hot water supply, and in turn altering the overall appearance of the pool.
(not explored)
View LARGER!
This is a shot of the North Star, Polaris, as the earth spins during one night in April in Eastern Oregon.
This shot is made from 24 individual, 7 minute, consecutive exposures; a total of about 2hr & 34min of startrails. I took these exposures, along with one completely black shot for noise reduction and one shot that I light-painted the foreground, and combined them all into one shot to achieve the effect of one, long exposure. I began this at around 10:30 at night, and was able to shoot two different compositions between 10:30 pm and 5:30 am. Needless to say, it wasn't a night that I achieved stage 3 or REM sleep. I did sleep, but with a few different alarms in the middle to notify me when to check the camera and stop the exposures.
I was amazed to see any light at all coming from the small town of Monument, Oregon in these photos. This is a town with a population of 150 people, and it is over 5 miles away from this location. It is amazing what a 7-min exposure can pick up at ISO 400.
Thanks for viewing, and I really appreciate any feedback and criticism you may have. Oh, and I shot this on a mountain, so that is why the horizon rises to the right!
Okay, I just learned something else... the average distance between each star in our galaxy is 30 TRILLION MILES! That is pretty difficult to wrap your head around, eh?
Flickr Explore #1 04/23/10
Canon 5D Mark II
Canon 17-40L @17mm
22 individual 7minute exposures @ F4
+ 1 light-painted foreground exposure
+ 1 noise reduction exposure
No filters
ISO 400
In my garden. La Ceja, Colombia.
Zinnia x hybrida cultivars are a cross between Zinnia elegans and Zinnia angustifolia. They have the short, compact size and profuse flowering of the former and the disease resistance of the latter. Flowers average between 2 and 3 inches in diameter.
Zinnia x hybrida is considered a dwarf group -- they have been bred to be much shorter and bushier than the species plants.
homeguides.sfgate.com/characteristics-zinnia-hybrida-9781...
Seeking sanctuary in the archive today, after spending hours waiting for the rain to stop. Unfortunate we have already used up our average of 5 days of sunshine this mouth in Somerset...!
Above average heat today ahead of a very blustery southerly buster tonight ... made for some very photogenic storms cells off Wollongong today.
Have a great weekend folks.
This is an HDR version of another shot I have on Flickr. The original image was how it was shot at an exposure that was an "average" of the highlights and shadows... this one is a composite of 7 different photos with seven different exposures.
The sun and sky were between 9 and 11 exposure values in difference from what I wanted the water to look like and was nearly impossible to filter for it so I decided to try and do an HDR that brought back more of the detail in the reflection and sky and made it more like it would have been if you were there. I also changed the white balance in camera on some of the exposures to warm the image up a little. This is the result.
This was done by hand in Photoshop CS2 and done with adjustment and masking layers. I find that this has more control for me than using the HDR function in Photoshop or other programs.
Thanks to everyone that voted and made this a winner of the HDR contest at
A HUGE Thanks to all that voted for this image at MY WINNERS as it was the WINNER of the 2nd Front Page Exposure Contest:
My Book, Cards, and Prints of ANY of my images are available at larsphotography.com
Thoroughly average power traverses a decidedly not thoroughly average, late-season snowy landscape at Kalama, Washington on BNSF's Seattle Sub, with coal headed north, either for the Centralia Generating Station or for export at Roberts Bank, BC.
The North Sea averages about 100 m. The beaches and coastal waters of the North Sea are popular destinations for tourists. The Dutch coasts are especially developed for tourism. Windsurfing and sailing are popular sports because of the winds. Because of the strong tides and areas of still water, the North Sea is more difficult to sail than the Baltic or the Mediterranean. Mudflat hiking, recreational fishing, and diving, including wreck diving, are all possible.
The climatic conditions on the North Sea coast are thought to be especially healthful. As early as the 19th century travellers used their stays on the North Sea coast as curative and restorative vacations . The sea air, temperature, wind, water, and sunshine are counted among the beneficial conditions that are said to activate the body's defences, improve circulation, strengthen the immune system, and have healing effects on the skin ;-)
I was lucky to catch this boy and girl running into the North sea during sunset at 22:00 with a sea surface temperature around 18.5 ˚C. It must have been romantic and
so refreshing for them ;-)
De Noordzee is een randzee van de Atlantische Oceaan in Noordwest-Europa, met een gemiddelde diepte van 100 meter. De temperatuur ligt gemiddeld tussen 18 °C ‘s zomers en 1 °C ‘s winters. De temperatuur varieert daarbij sterk, afhankelijk van de waterdiepte en de stroming vanuit de Atlantische Oceaan.
I'm off to the beach.....again
While trying to photograph some mining bees (Four Banded Flower Bees) I realised the area was full of these wonderful Bee Wolf Wasps ( Philanthus Triangulum). They prey on honey bees, capturing them for their young. This female is opening the entrance to her tunnel, the gruesome resting place of this bee. Inside will be a number of chambers. Before cleaning the stunned but still alive bee, she coats it in a preservative mix of bacteria and anti-fungal. The wasp will then lay an egg on each bee, one per chamber. When the egg hatches, the grub will feed on the still alive bee keeping it alive as long as possible by eating non vital parts first.
Even more surprising was to see rub-tailed wasps entering the tunnel when the female leaves. This wasp is a cuckoo wasp that consumes the larvae of the host, in this case the bee wolf. Astonishing to watch.
The four banded flower bees were not touched by the bee wolf, instead it seemed that it chased off other wasps so maybe they get some protection by nesting in the same area. Protection from anything apart from the dragon flies which took whatever they fancied including the huge ichneumon wasps that were also in the vicinity. Any insect parts left laying around were cleaned up by the numerous different ant species on patrol.
Landscape of Tibet
Tibet is the highest country on earth with an average elevation of over 4000m. The lowest regions of Tibet are still over 2000m above sea level with Jomo Langma (Everest,Sagarmatha) ཇོ་མོ་གླང་མ being the highest point at 8848m. Tibet is covered in grasslands, mountains and valleys.
Many of Asia’s largest rivers have their headwaters in Tibet such as the Ma chu རྨ་ཆུ་ ( Yellow River), Dri chu འབྲི་ཆུ་ (Yangtze), Nag chu ནག་ཆུ་ - རྒྱ་མོ་རྔུལ་ཆུ (Salween), Yarlung Tsangpo ཡར་ཀླུངས་གཙང་པོ་ (Brahmaputra) and Dza chu རྫ་ཆུ་ (Mekong). Western Tibet (Ngari) is a high, arid region with few people, while southeast Tibet (Kham) is forested and suitable for farming. Northern Tibet (Amdo) is covered in vast grasslands filled with yaks and sheep and central Tibet (U-Tsang) is the most densely populated area of Tibet lying along the fertile Yarlung Valley.
For Station Saturday here's another from this fun little cloudy day northbound chase of the Batten Kill....my 11th success out of 19 visits for a 'batting average' of .579!
Veteran Alcos SNEX 408 (RS36 blt. Aug. 1962 as Norfolk and Western 408) and SCH 3501 (RS1 blt. Jul. 1951 as Dupont 107) are slowly rolling through the village of Cambridge at about MP A136.9 on the old Delaware and Hudson Washington Branch as measured from Albany the long way around via Castleton, Whitehall, and Mechanicville. At right is the 1909 built passenger station which saw its last scheduled train call in 1933. Now home to Argyle Brewing Company's tap room, it is well worth a stop if you're ever in the area some evening. In my humble opinion there are few better places to enjoy a cold craft brew and some live music than in an old train station that sits in its original location beside one of the coolest little shortlines in all the land.
The 408 belongs to David Coppola's Southern New England Railroad and is one of a two Alcos acquired from the Ontario Midland in 2023. It had suffered and ailment shortly before and was dead, leaving its elderly counterpart to do all the work for the trip north to Greenwich Junction. Affectionately known as 'Buttercup', the 3501 belongs to Hal Raven's Saratoga, Corinth and Hudson. Built for DuPont it worked at the Savannah River Site for decades during the height of the Cold War nuclear arms race. Later sold to the Huntsville Madison Airport Authority, it served the industrial park there until migrating north from Alabama in 2023.
Cambridge, New York
Friday April 25, 2025
With only a short (2 day) visit to Tokyo, I was very fortunate to have a beautiful sunny day to explore the tail end of Hanami and the (already falling) sakura bloom. Tokyo's cherry blossoms started to bloom about 2 weeks ahead of the average and I was a bit worried that I was going to miss it. Thankfully though, there were still plenty of great viewing areas to explore including the Meguro River.
I spent a couple hours wandering along the river, crossing all the little bridges, and searching for an area to set up my camera. With so many beautiful spots, it wasn't easy to choose but I eventually settled on the one you see here. As I stood there, the wind kicked up, producing strong gusts that caused thousands of cherry blossom petals to rain down all around me. Consequently, the wind also made photography more difficult with the fading light. Let’s just say that it was a frustratingly beautiful problem to have. ;)
While heading to shoot an IHB job we stumbled into a SD70 DPU going around the Gary Airport heading south, it was figured that a pair of SD70's would be up front and boy was that the case. After clearing the Gary airport loop IC 1007 and 1010 dig in hard to get the monster L537 transfer up to speed with help from the 1008 DPU'd 136 cars back. Weighing in at 16,202 tons, 171 cars, 9849 feet this train was nothing but Glen yard traffic with no work between the two points. Seen from 15th st, the pair of elephant style death stars find some late afternoon sun that was getting harder to find with the days shadows coming in to claim the day.
(Calendulauda poecilosterna)
Some
Tanzânia
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All my photos are now organized into sets by the country where they were taken, by taxonomic order, by family, by species (often with just one photo for the rarer ones), and by the date they were taken.
So, you may find:
- All the photos for this trip Tanzânia (2025) (377)
- All the photos for this order PASSERIFORMES (3553)
- All the photos for this family Alaudidae // Alaudídeos (129)
- All the photos for this species Calendulauda poecilosterna (1)
- All the photos taken this day 2025/04/29 (28)
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Please don't use this image on websites, blogs or other media without explicit permission. © 2013 Doha Dove. All rights reserved.
Keeping it simple and casual today, you know how I do.
Backdrop: Pseudo - Gym Entrance Scene
Bag: REIGN. - Beach bum bag
Cup: Besom ~ Beauty Tumblers #5
//Wearing//
Hair: Stealthic - Aquaria
Top: TETRA - ruffle crop top
Wrists: Quirky&LovelyDisarray. - Rebel Bracelet
Rings: (Yummy) Minimalist Rings
Bottom: Blueberry - Rie - torn jeans
Shoes: REIGN. - Mini Slips
The Taralga Wind Farm in New South Wales, Australia, is a 51-turbine installation that can power around 45,000 average Australian homes per year. I chose the site as the foreground for a Milky Way panorama that I photographed between 1:00 & 2:00 am on Saturday 3rd of August. Like the title says, this image includes five galaxies, all visible to the naked eye, and I have also noted some other objects that were visible on the night.
The five galaxies you can see in the photo are 1. The Large Magellanic Cloud, 2. The Small Magellanic Cloud, 3. Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, 4. The Andromeda Galaxy, aka M31, and 5. The Triangulum Galaxy, M33. I admit that the fourth and fifth of those are hard to see, but they’re there in the photo, and I could see them even with my 55-year-old eyes. Also noted in the picture is the globular cluster Omega Centauri, as well as the planets Jupiter and Saturn. The photo doesn’t show how cold it was on this night, but this was the first time I’ve seen a 0-degree Celsius reading on my car’s thermometer.
I shot each of the 17 photos that make up the panorama using a Canon EOS 6D camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, with an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.