View allAll Photos Tagged behaviour
Cock Pheasants squaring up to each other although this encounter ended peacefully with just a bit of posturing before one decided to walk away.
I've always meant to seek out and shoot this Erratic boulder on top of Twisleton Scar, but time and conditions have tended to be against me. I set to put that right this weekend with a shoot late yesterday and again this morning. Thankfully for a brief while the conditions were with me on both occasions.
Van de Kam, J., Ens, B., Piersma, T., and Zwarts, L. (2004) Shorebirds: An illustrated behavioural ecology. KNNV publishers.
copyright: © FSUBF. All rights reserved. Please do not use this image, or any images from my photostream, without my permission.
From dusk until late, Bourke Street’s Royal Mail House will be re-animated by the dazzling, kinetic light installation – maxims of behaviour – by artist, Alexander Knox.
Governments around the world are drawing on behavioural insights to improve public policy outcomes: from automatic enrolment for pensions, to better tax compliance, to increasing the supply of organ donation.
But those very same policy makers are also subject to biases that can distort decision making. The Behavioural Insights Team has been studying those biases and what can be done to counter them, in collaboration with Jill Rutter and Julian McCrae of the Institute for Government.
The report was launched with remarks from Alex Chisholm, Permanent Secretary at the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy.
Dr Michael Hallsworth, Director of the Behavioural Insights Team in North America presented the key findings.
The findings, their relevance to policy making today, and what they mean for the way governments make decisions were discussed by:
Polly Mackenzie, Director of Policy for the Deputy Prime Minister, 2010–15 and now Director of Demos
Dr Tony Curzon Price, Economic Advisor to the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
The event was chaired by Jill Rutter, Programme Director at the Institute for Government.
#IfGBIT
Photos by Candice McKenzie
Interesting and intelligent behaviour displayed by this Herring Gull. It repeatedly flew up in the air with a shell, releasing it on to the rocky shore in order crack the shell and eat the contents.
I saw this walking out of my night class on The Biology of Brain and Behaviour. The light reflecting off the open architecture, setting sun, and lone chair passed through my cornea and projected onto my retinas. My cones then converted these photons into chemical energy which excited my ganglion cells. These in turn caused action potentials that traveled down my two optic nerves to converge, and cross, at the optic chiasm. The right side of the scene traveled to my left occipital lobe and the left side of the scene traveled to my right occipital lobe. This information then projected through the laternal geniculate nuclei and onto my primary visual cortex.
Once a conscious image was formed the electrical signals quickly spread along two separate pathways. The ventral stream leading to the temporal lobe allowed me to recognize the colour of the sunset, name the building, and decide the funny thing with four legs was called a chair. The dorsal stream leading to the parietal lobe allowed me to perceive the motion of the clouds, interpret the motion of my own body, and walk over to pick up the chair. Placing it like it is seen here.
After integrating all of this information yet another set of signals reached my prefrontal cortex where I began planning the shot. Once I had a firm idea of how I wanted it to look this information traveled back along the top of my head through the premotor cortex, which sequenced my actions, and then moved on to the primary motor cotex. This resulted in me removing my camera from my bag, removing the lens cap, turning on my camera, focusing and composing this shot, taking a meter reading, adjusting the aperature, then depressing the shutter. Of course it takes both hemispheres to do this, the right to control my left hand and the left to control my right hand.
The information processing required to take this shot (in an oversimplified manner described above) takes me three paragraphs to describe, over six minutes to compose and type, and about three minutes to edit. Here’s the real kicker; it only takes thirty seconds to perform. We use many words to describe the human brain, all of which are a byproduct of having such an unusually large one, but maybe the most appropriate adjective ever used is simply:
MAGICAL.
Odd behaviour of Ring-billed Gull.... my friend Penny told me one day that she had seen Gulls feeding on berry trees. I thought it was strange. So next time I was in that area for other wildlife, I remembered about this and watched them for a while. They sure have a hard time standing on a branch and they do like berries too.
We had a lovely day out with friends today at a local farm. Last time the children were rather startled by the livestock, but today they had a fab time!
Took a few attempts but eventually got this one diving, many of a splash and just the tail feathers .
St Aidan's Nature Park.
Just managed to find a gap in the reeds but no fish this time for this Common Tern.
St Aidan's Nature Park.
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Latin name: Phoenicopterus - Flamingo
Flamingos or flamingoes are a type of wading bird in the family Phoenicopteridae, the only family in the order Phoenicopteriformes. There are four flamingo species in the Americas and two species in the Old World.
Flamingos usually stand on one leg while the other is tucked beneath their body. The reason for this behaviour is not fully understood. Recent research indicates that standing on one leg may allow the birds to conserve more body heat, given that they spend a significant amount of time wading in cold water. However, the behaviour also takes place in warm water. As well as standing in the water, flamingos may stamp their webbed feet in the mud to stir up food from the bottom.
Young flamingos hatch with greyish reddish plumage, but adults range from light pink to bright red due to aqueous bacteria and beta-Carotene obtained from their food supply. A well-fed, healthy flamingo is more vibrantly colored and thus a more desirable mate; a white or pale flamingo, however, is usually unhealthy or malnourished. Captive flamingos are a notable exception; many turn a pale pink as they are not fed carotene at levels comparable to the wild.
Flamingos filter-feed on brine shrimp and blue-green algae. Their beaks are specially adapted to separate mud and silt from the food they eat, and are uniquely used upside-down. The filtering of food items is assisted by hairy structures called lamellae which line the mandibles, and the large rough-surfaced tongue. The pink or reddish color of flamingos comes from carotenoids in their diet of animal and plant plankton. These carotenoids are broken down into pigments by liver enzymes. The source of this varies by species, and affects the saturation of color. Flamingos whose sole diet is blue-green algae are darker in color compared to those who get it second hand (e.g. from animals that have digested blue-green algae).
Flamingos are very social birds; they live in colonies whose population can number in the thousands. These large colonies are believed to serve three purposes for the flamingos: avoiding predators, maximizing food intake, and using scarce suitable nesting sites more efficiently. Before breeding, flamingo colonies split into breeding groups of about 15 to 50 birds. Both males and females in these groups perform synchronized ritual displays. The members of a group stand together and display to each other by stretching their necks upwards, then uttering calls while head-flagging, and then flapping their wings. The displays do not seem to be directed towards an individual but instead occur randomly. These displays stimulate "synchronous nesting" (see below) and help pair up those birds who do not already have mates.
Flamingos form strong pair bonds although in larger colonies flamingos sometimes change mates, presumably because there are more mates to choose from. Flamingo pairs establish and defend nesting territories. They locate a suitable spot on the mudflat to build a nest (the spot is usually chosen by the female). It is during nest building that copulation usually occurs. Nest building is sometimes interrupted by another flamingo pair trying to commandeer the nesting site for their own use. Flamingos aggressively defend their nesting sites. Both the male and the female contribute to building the nest, and to defending the nest and egg. Occasional same-sex pairs have been reported.
After the chicks hatch, the only parental expense is feeding. Both the male and the female feed their chicks with a kind of crop milk, produced in glands lining the whole of the upper digestive tract (not just the crop). Production is stimulated by the hormone prolactin. The milk contains fat, protein, and red and white blood cells. (Pigeons and doves—Columbidae—also produce a crop milk (just in the glands lining the crop), which contains less fat and more protein than flamingo crop milk.
For the first six days after the chicks hatch, the adults and chicks stay in the nesting sites. At around seven to twelve days old, the chicks begin to move out of their nests and explore their surroundings. When they are two weeks old, the chicks congregate in groups, called "microcrèches", and their parents leave them alone. After a while, the microcrèches merge into "crèches" containing thousands of chicks. Chicks that do not stay in their crèches are vulnerable to predators.
Taken on our trip to Pensthorpe Nature Reserve in Norfolk. Part of the main group of flamingos.
Taken with my Tamron SP 150-600mm f/5.6-6.3 Di VC USD A011 Lens and framed in Photoshop.
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