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Nombre común: El pibí boreal
Nombre científico: Contopus cooperi
Nombre en inglés: OLIVE -SIDED FLYCATCHER
Nombre en alemán: Olivflanken Schnäppertyrann
Nombre en francés: Moucherolle á côtés olive
Lugar de la foto: Cataratas de Medina, Mariquita, Tolima, Colombia.
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Baby girl African bush elephant (Loxodonta africana), born September 26 to mother Umngani. She is 16 days old in this picture. San Diego Zoo Safari Park. Conservation Status: Vulnerable
completely personal. completely vulnerable.
today has been awful. i just want everything to end. i can't wait to escape.
i haven't taken such honest picture in a long time. if ever. it says so much. to myself. i put my pain into it.
taking pictures has probably never made me feel the way it did today.
271/365.
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Copyright ©Zino2009 (bob van den berg) . All my images are protected under international authors copyright laws and may not be downloaded, reproduced, copied, transmitted or manipulated without my written explicit permission.
These trees look beautiful as they stand in rows, creating such depth with light and lines.
This beauty if man made. None of these trees are old.
This trail followed used to be a road to a town in the middle of the forest. A little mill town. A forest fire whiped out the town and the trees.
People planted these trees closely in rows.
The trees are real, but they are too perfect, a fake perfect.
www.rspb.org.uk/discoverandenjoynature/discoverandlearn/b...
Also known as the peewit in imitation of its display calls, its proper name describes its wavering flight. Its black and white appearance and round-winged shape in flight make it distinctive, even without its splendid crest. This familiar farmland bird has suffered significant declines recently and is now an Red List species.
Overview
Latin name
Vanellus vanellus
Family
Plovers and lapwings (Charadriidae)
Where to see them
Lapwings are found on farmland throughout the UK particularly in lowland areas of northern England, the Borders and eastern Scotland. In the breeding season prefer spring sown cereals, root crops, permanent unimproved pasture, meadows and fallow fields. They can also be found on wetlands with short vegetation. In winter they flock on pasture and ploughed fields. The highest known winter concentrations of lapwings are found at the Somerset Levels, Humber and Ribble estuaries, Breydon Water/Berney Marshes, the Wash, and Morecambe Bay.
When to see them
All year round. Leaves upland areas after the breeding season and moves to lowland fields for the winter. Large numbers of N European birds arrive in autumn for the winter.
What they eat
Worms and insects
Population
UK Breeding:- 140,000 pairs
UK Wintering:- 650,000 birds
Breeding
The winter flocks begin to break up in February, when the birds will start to return to their breeding grounds.
The lapwing has a spectacular songflight. The male wobbles, zigzags, rolls and dives while calling to advertise his presence to rival males and potential mates. The birds tend to nest in loose groups. Individual territories are small about 0.4-0.8 ha and are only held until the chicks hatch.
In the breeding season, lapwings need a mosaic of habitats, because they need different conditions for nesting and for chick rearing.
The nest is a scrape in the ground, lined with a variable amount of plant material. The birds need a good all round view from the nest to spot predators, and nest either on bare ground or in short vegetation. They often choose rough or broken ground to aid concealment of the nest. Spring sown crops and rough grazing are ideal.
They lay clutches of four cryptically coloured eggs from late March to early June, and chicks hatch 3-4 weeks later. They are covered in down when they hatch, and are able to walk about and feed within hours.
Soon after hatching, the parents will lead them to suitable feeding areas, where the supply of surface invertebrates is good and the vegetation low. They particularly need to have nearby grassland, especially if it contains flood pools and damp patches.
The transfer between the nesting and chick-rearing habitats can be hazardous, and chick survival often depends on how far they have to travel. The families stay in the chick-rearing habitat until the young are ready to fly at 5-6 weeks old. Lapwings only rear one brood a year, but may lay up to four replacement clutches if the eggs are lost.
Legal status
The lapwing is fully protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981; it an offence to kill, injure or take an adult lapwing, or to take, damage or destroy an active nest or its contents.
The only exception is legitimate farming practices that cannot be reasonably delayed, although farming methods can often be modified to reduce the impact on the lapwings.
Population trends
Lapwing numbers have decreased in Britain since the middle of the 19th century. The early declines were caused by large scale collection of eggs for food. Introduction of the Lapwing Act in 1926 prohibited this, and was followed by a considerable recovery in bird numbers.
Since the 1940s lapwing declines have been driven by large-scale changes to farming. Large areas of grassland were converted to arable, marginal land was drained and improved, and chemicals were introduced for fertilisers and pest control with increasing reliance on them. By 1960 the lapwing population had stabilised at a lower level.
Another sharp and sustained decline started in the mid-1980s, with range contractions in south-west England and in parts of Wales. This followed further intensification and specialisation - abandonment of rotations, switch from spring to autumn sown crops, increased drainage, increased use of agrochemicals. Such changes have resulted in much of the arable land becoming unsuitable for nesting by April because the crop grows too high. Tillage, drainage and pesticides have also caused a reduction in food availability.
As pasture land is improved, the resulting increased risk of trampling by livestock, earlier cutting for silage and lower food availability have affected lapwings adversely. Phasing out of rotational farming and shift of arable to the east of England and pastureland to the west of England has removed the habitat mosaic that is essential for successful chick rearing.
Mosaic where grass and spring tillage fields are close together has declined significantly in recent years, and the loss of this prime habitat has resulted in a decline in lapwing numbers.
Nest failures on arable land come from egg losses during cultivation and from predation, and poor chick survival due to crop growth. Crop growth can also shorten the laying season.
The declines in lapwing population have been greatest in southern England and Wales, where the farming changes have been greatest and farmland is the only suitable habitat for the lapwing. Between 1987 and 1998 lapwing numbers dropped by 49% in England and Wales. Since 1960 the numbers dropped by 80%.
The birds have fared better in Scotland, where the crucial changes to farming were introduced later than in England and Wales. However, even there the numbers have dropped by 29% since 1987.
Lapwings have to fledge at least 0.6 young per pair each year to maintain the population. They usually can achieve this in rough grazing and unimproved pastures, but often not on arable land or improved grassland. Since the birds cannot produce enough chicks to offset the natural mortality of adults, population declines.
It is possible to halt and reverse the decline in lapwing numbers with sympathetic farming methods, which include creation of a mosaic of spring sown crops and grassland, managing grazing pressure and maintaining damp areas on unimproved grassland. Agri-environment schemes in each part of the UK provide grants to help land-owners manage their land to help lapwings.
Survival
Egg survival and hatching success varies depending on the habitat, and appears to have declined in some habitats over the past decade.
Main causes of nest failure are predation, agricultural activity and desertion. While the birds often re-lay, changes in cropping practices often result in the habitat being unsuitable for replacement clutches because the vegetation has grown too tall, thus shortening the potential breeding season.
Only about 25-40% of chicks survive to fledging. Most of the chick mortality occurs in the first few days after hatching, when chicks are most vulnerable to cold or wet weather, and when they may be undertaking hazardous journeys from nesting to feeding areas. The further chicks have to go, the lower their survival.
Once the birds have reached adulthood, they can expect to live a further 4-5 years. The oldest known individual was about 20 years. Lapwings normally breed one year after fledging.
Turbo, a male Andean (Spectacled) born in 2010 and now living at the San Diego Zoo. Andean bears are the most vegetarian of all bears except pandas. Only about 5% of their calories comes from rodents and insects. Conservation Status: Vulnerable
Do you see Vulnerability or Defiance?
Today is officially something different Friday? :-) So something different from me. I would like to do more shots like these but if I'm honest I found "the body" quite hard a subject to shoot. It belongs together with my other image "Victim or Predator". I hope you like it.
And TFI Friday :-)
EXPLORE FRONT PAGE Wahooo, I can't believe it, I really can't believe it.
Explore #19
Black Dragon Pool Park
Old Town Of Lijiang
Yunnan Province, People's Republic Of China
"The water that feeds the five-hectare Black Dragon Pool bubbles up
from the foot of Elephant Hill. Here a stone bridge and the elegant
three-tiered Deyue Pavilion offer stunning prospects of the mountain,
trailing a wisp of cloud like a scarf on the breeze" -- Peter Moss
(an excerpt from the book "Lijiang, The Imperiled Utopia")
Female leopard (Panthera pardus) named "Nkoveni" born August 2012 in the San River region of South Africa. She is the mother of two cubs who were born ~March 2021. Londolozi Game Reserve, Sabi Sands, South Africa. Conservation Status: Vulnerable
I rarely photograph eagles sitting on the ground. One big advantage of perching high up in a tree is that it gives them a position of strength to view possible prey as well as keep an eye open for enemies.
This one appears a bit vulnerable as he surveys the terrain around him and is hoping it is safe to walk over a few yards to some roadside kill by a busy road.
The Great Curassow is a large, pheasant-like bird from the Neotropical rainforests, its range extending from eastern Mexico, through Central America to western Colombia and northwestern Ecuador. Male birds are black with curly crests and yellow beaks; females come in three colour morphs, barred, rufous and black.
This species is threatened by loss of habitat and hunting, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature has rated its conservation status as "vulnerable". As this is a difficult bird to find in the wild, I went to see this captive female at Hamerton Zoo which specialises in rare and endangered animals.
Gam, Raja Ampat, West Papua, Indonesia
This female Waigeo Cuscus appeared to have a juvenile Northern Cuscus (Phalanger orientalis) in its pouch..
Vulnerable
Contact me on jono_dashper@hotmail.com for use of this image.
“To share your weakness is to make yourself vulnerable; to make yourself vulnerable is to show your strength.”
Poem:
Cheer up, O grievous snail.
I tap your shell, encouragingly,
not that you will ever know about it.
And I want nothing to do with you, either, sulking toad.
Imagine, at least four times my size and yet so vulnerable.
I could open your belly with my claw.
You glare and bulge, a
watchdog near my pool; you make a loud and hollow noise.
I do not care for such stupidity.
I admire compression, lightness,
and agility, all rare in this loose world.
"To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.”
at Happy, Alaska.
Flashback Friday.
ca. mid-late 1980s.
Mush was not really our dog, but he did live with us off and on for a while. We met while Chance was still a puppy and Mush's person at the time was my cabinmate. We shared a dry cabin, no phone, no electric and about a tenth of a mile off the one lane, pothole filled, dead end dirt road. Judy had rescued him from a remote town, Kotzebue, above the Arctic Circle. People often talk about rescuing dogs, but Mush and Judy’s story is unique and a very literal rescue.
Judy was living in “Kotz” doing, if I’m not mistaken, graduate work. I’m sure she had seen Mush before, but one day while he was harnessed and in team, she heard yelling; his owner pulled a gun and was about to shoot him dead. Evidently Mush was a fighter and was not receptive to being told what to do by this person. This method of training, shooting a dog in harness while his teammates look on was meant as a lesson to the other dogs that they better behave. Truly misguided and cruel – “training” through fear and intimidation. But things were different in the bush and some people could not afford to keep a dog that not only did not perform, but also harmed other dogs in the team.
Judy intervened, “don’t shoot that dog!” And the person reluctantly acquiesced, warned her about his behavior, and said, “get him the hell out of here.” (or something to that effect).
Judy returned to Fairbanks for University studies (where we met and became roommates), of course she loved that dog with all her heart, with all her being, and he no doubt loved her as well, realizing maybe not that she saved his life, but that she got him away from a bad person.
It was said that Mush was ½ wolf. I usually take such claims with a grain of salt, but with Mush I believed it. Huskies can be very aloof, and arguably most or all of them can be traced to some wolf heritage, but Mush was the most aloof dog that I have ever experienced. Also, he did not like men, any wonder. But he tolerated me and eventually we became as close as he would allow. Later Lenore came around and she fell for him and he preferred to live with her in her little cabin. He provided her security and comfort. But I jumped ahead a bit.
Judy and Mush moved in when Chance was still a young pup, he was not aggressive with the rambunctious puppy, but as a matter of training and demonstrating who was boss, he would sit with seemingly all his weight (he was big) on Chance the pup. Chance learned. In his time with me Mush was a strong freight dog, helping haul firewood locally and supplies out to my remote cabin site. I even named a stretch of trail after him, “Mush’s Misery,” as it was a long uphill slog and he would put his head down, lean into his harness and march ahead without complaint.
Later Mush disappeared and some weeks or months later I was surprised to see him at a friends cabin. This was not near where Lenore or I had lived. The friend was surprised that I knew him, as surprised as I was to find him living with her. She said he just appeared on her porch one day and stayed, as if he lived there. She was involved in a separation and felt alone and vulnerable too in that place. She was convinced that Mush sensed this, and intentionally appeared to protect her and provide comfort. They had not met before. I didn’t really feel like it was my choice, so he stayed. Eventually he disappeared from her too, and that’s all we know.
He made it on his own through a deadly desert. He crossed the ocean on a small boat that was hardly seaworthy. I think of my own childhood...
Merry Christmas to all of you. I hope the day, and the season, has brought all of you great joy.
It was a silent night on the Niles Canyon Railway. After an evening chasing the Train of Lights, the heavy overcast departed, allowing a near full moon to shine on the countryside. It also provided the best backdrop against the vulnerable semaphores guarding Sunol. Yes, the signal indication was not correct for the signal indication, but hey, it worked!