The foto is by Yongqing Bao, depicting a Tibetan fox vs a Himalayan marmot in China's Qilian Mountains.
For reference sake in the States, we usually associate "marmots" with groundhogs / whistlepigs / woodchucks, but what if I told you that there were well over a dozen of these chonky ground squirrels, globally?
From The Raptor Trust
It is with heavy hearts that we share the passing of Pearl, our beloved 18-year-old American Robin.
For many years, Pearl was a favorite among visitors, volunteers, and staff alike. Her striking appearance, gentle presence, and resilient spirit touched countless lives, making her a truly unforgettable ambassador for her species.
Pearl was leucistic, a rare condition that causes a partial or complete loss of pigmentation in an animal's feathers, skin, fur, or scales. Unlike albinism, leucism does not affect the eyes, which retain their normal dark color. While most American Robins are known for their vibrant red-orange breast, Pearl carried only a faint blush of color there, with the rest of her plumage a beautiful, almost pure white.
As Pearl aged, she received a little extra care and comfort. During the cold winter months, she spent her time indoors in our infirmary, safe from the harsh weather. But when warmer days returned, Pearl was always eager to be outside. Visitors delighted in watching her hop about her enclosure, bask in the sunshine, and enjoy her favorite treats of fresh fruit and mealworms.
At 18 years old, Pearl was one of the oldest American Robins ever documented in captivity; perhaps even the oldest. Her longevity was extraordinary, but even more remarkable was the joy and wonder she brought to everyone who met her.
Though her enclosure now sits a little quieter, Pearl's legacy lives on in the memories she created and the countless people she inspired to appreciate and care for wildlife. Thank you, Pearl, for sharing your life with us. You were truly one of a kind, and you will be deeply missed.
Godspeed, sweet Pearl.
From Harold Wilion
I was starting to get bored of the same old Bluebird perch shots on the same perches and didn't feel like finding new ones. So, I've been concentrating on trying to get some flight shots. I actually find it totally impossible to get them in a real fight scenario for a number of reasons.
One, is that they are so fast as soon as they jump off a perch the autofocus just can't keep up. Also, I'm not shooting in bright light which I'm sure would help. So, I decided to just go with the jump shot, the first fraction of a second when they leave a perch knowing I can't really follow them.
Unfortunately, my reaction time just isn't quick enough because they really give no sign they are about to take off. So, I've resorted to using pre-capture on my Nikon. Unfortunately, Nikon only does JPEG for pre-capture, so couple that with low light, the quality just isn't as good as if I were able to use RAW.
Also, with the shutter speeds I have to use in order not to get too much noise, pretty much everything has motion blur, which I actually love in the wings, but pretty much always need some Topaz in the head.
I'll definitely try more in better light, but in the meantime, these are what I got. But it is what it is, and it has kept me occupied.
Honestly, now! 😠
What the heck dog breed is that, anyway??
EDIT: I pre-posted a comment with the actual animal.
Does that show up below for anyone..?
From Paul Woodford
Predator becomes the prey.
I had this lucky chance encounter recently on a trip to Lake Kerkini in Greece, This Dice Snake had just caught this Zander while we were watching it
04/06/2026
Lake Kerkini Greece
Sony a1 ii
300mm
F2.8
ISO 250
1/2500 sec - with Borislava Georgieva at Lake Kerkini National Park.
From Butch Fermil
Young Black-tailed jack rabbits / Hare at play and having fun. Glad to witness their famous acrobatic and energetic spring show. Took about 75 exposures all eye level and here's some.
From The Lonely Camp
A bat in the American desert lands on the ground, folds its wings, walks up to a scorpion, and eats it. The scorpion stings it repeatedly during the fight. The bat shows no reaction.
Researchers at UC Riverside injected pallid bats with the venom of the Arizona bark scorpion, North America's most venomous scorpion species, at concentrations that would kill a mouse, and the bats behaved as if nothing had happened. The pallid bat is immune to the most dangerous scorpion on the continent and it hunts them on foot in the dark by listening for the sound of their legs moving across sand.
Most bats hunt by echolocation, sending out ultrasonic pulses and reading the returns to locate flying insects in midair. The pallid bat does not do this. It belongs to a small group of species called gleaners, bats that hunt from surfaces rather than in flight. The pallid bat uses its enormous ears to listen for prey-generated sounds on the ground: the scratch of a cricket's leg, the rustle of a centipede through leaf litter, the click of a scorpion crossing hardpan. When it locates the sound, it drops out of the air, lands beside the prey, and attacks on foot. It uses echolocation mostly for navigation and obstacle avoidance, not hunting. Its primary sensory tool for finding food is passive hearing so acute that it can pinpoint a scorpion walking across sand from flight altitude in total darkness.
The bat weighs between half an ounce and an ounce. It is roughly four inches long with a wingspan of fifteen inches and a blunt, pig-like snout. It is pale yellow- brown, built for blending into the desert substrates it hunts across. White Sands National Park says a pallid bat can eat half its body weight in arthropods in a single night. Its diet includes crickets, centipedes, cicadas, beetles, small lizards, and mice. The scorpion is the signature prey.
The venom resistance was confirmed in a 2017 study published in PLOS ONE by Bradley Hopp and Khaleel Razak at the University of California, Riverside. The researchers filmed pallid bats hunting live Arizona bark scorpions in controlled lab conditions. The bats were stung multiple times during every encounter. The stings produced no visible change in behavior. The bats did not flinch, did not slow down, and did not hesitate before attacking the next scorpion.
To test the limits, the team injected pallid bats with bark scorpion venom at the dose that kills fifty percent of mice (1.5 milligrams per kilogram of body weight). No effect. They increased the dose to nearly seven times the mouse lethal concentration. Three out of four bats showed no effect at all. The fourth showed a brief, transient response and recovered. A sting that sends a human to the emergency room and kills a mouse outright does not register in the pallid bat's nervous system.
The mechanism is not in the blood. The researchers tested whether pallid bat blood serum neutralized the venom before it reached the nerves. It did not. Venom incubated in bat serum retained full potency when injected into mice. The bats do not detoxify the venom. They ignore it. The resistance operates at the level of the sensory neurons themselves, likely through altered sodium ion channels that the venom's toxins are designed to activate. The scorpion's weapon targets a lock that the bat's nervous system has changed.
We covered a similar adaptation on this page with the grasshopper mouse, the small desert rodent that eats bark scorpions and howls at the moon. The grasshopper mouse uses a comparable mechanism: a mutation in its sodium channels converts the scorpion's pain signal into an analgesic effect, essentially turning the venom into a painkiller. Two unrelated desert animals, a bat and a mouse, evolved the same answer to the same problem independently. The bark scorpion's venom is one of the most effective chemical weapons in North American wildlife, and two of its neighbors found the off switch.
There is one more layer. Pallid bats visit cactus flowers. They are not doing it for the nectar, or at least not primarily. They are hunting insects that congregate around the blooms. But in the process of landing on the flowers and crawling across them to grab prey, they pick up pollen on their fur and carry it to the next flower. Bat Conservation International lists the pallid bat as a natural pollinator of several cactus species. An animal that spends its nights landing on the desert floor to eat scorpions that sting it without effect is also, by accident, keeping the cactus population alive.
The pallid bat does not echolocate to find its food. It listens. It does not catch insects in the air. It lands and walks. It does not avoid the most venomous scorpion in North America. It eats them. It gets stung during every hunt and processes the venom as background noise. And when it flies between scorpion kills, it pollinates the desert. Nothing about this animal works the way a bat is supposed to work, and all of it works.
Source: Hopp et al. (2017), PLOS ONE. Bat Conservation International. White Sands National Park Service. Animal Diversity Web, University of Michigan. UC Riverside Department of Psychology.
A male crowned lemur (right) grooms the dominant female (2nd pic)
Crowned lemurs exhibit a strict matriarchal social structure where the dominant female leads the troop. She holds exclusive priority access to the best food resources and sleeping spots. Males will even groom her and defer to her during foraging. --NIH website
Crowned lemur social groups typically consist of 5 to 6 individuals, which include multiple adult males and females. Dominance allows the matriarch to maintain her energy reserves, which are vital for nursing and rearing offspring. --Atlanta Zoo
So evidently these cuties (and cousins of ours) work like meerkats in terms of social hierarchy. I first learned about such watching the lovely, excellent Meerkat Manor documentary TV show. More than just about any other animal docu I've ever watched, it gave a frank, nuanced look at the daily lives of meerkats, to the point that it almost seemed like a soap opera at times.
The first season is available to watch for free, here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIrl2otzxic&list=PLoryjdpCxlhWOoMFARDuU6Ih8jEngv1w1
Note: despite the two animals looking somewhat similar, lemurs belong to the Primate order, and mongooses to the Carnivoran order, specifically the Feliform (cat-shaped carnivores) suborder. The other major suborder in Carnivora is of course the Caniforms (dog-shaped carnivores).
Duke U. in N. Carolina runs a "lemur center" and put together a nice web intro here:
https://lemur.duke.edu/discover/meet-the-lemurs/crowned-lemur/
Most rehab jobs are not glamorous, and here is one I'm well familiar with.
Without their mothers and stuck in a strange environment (with people), orphaned animals will console themselves in ways that can be harmful to themselves or others.
Last week we admitted 3 young skunks to the center for care after their mother had been found deceased. After a few days it was noted that the male of the group had swollen genitals from someone trying to nurse on him. He was immediately separated from the group and started on medication. It was later discovered that he was actually doing it to himself... As a result, he gets the Sock of Shame so that he can heal.
Genital nursing does occur in rehabilitative animals for a number of reasons. When young animals (especially orphans or those weaned too early) suckle on the genitals of their littermates or caregivers, it is known as "cross-suckling" or "sibling suckling." It is an instinctive, non-nutritive behavior typically driven by the need for comfort, missed maternal bonding, or misplaced nursing instincts.
Orphaned animals frequently turn to this behavior for emotional comfort, warmth, and self-soothing. It simulates the security of being with their mother as suckling triggers the release of calming, feel-good hormones. Because the behavior becomes associated with relief and relaxation, the animal continues the behavior to pacify itself when stressed. While the behavior may stem from innocent rooting, it can become compulsive. Cross-sucking can lead to severe skin irritation, genital injuries, and infections.
While receiving medications, and having to wear the Sock of Shame, we have also provided this little one with a larger enclosure space, that is darker and quieter, as well as additional toys to play with and hide under to help distract him from what is clearly a stressful experience for him.
Another video I'm liberating from the Evil Empire, because why not? Frankly I know very little about these animals, but let's see what I can scrounge up:
"One of the most majestic creatures IME. Also extremely intelligent as far as snakes go (which isn’t very far), and able to use that completely to their advantage. I would like to add that they also growl when angry, and if you’ve never heard it, it’s an absolutely terrifying and extremely unnerving sound that will send shivers down your spine." --u/cncomg
The king cobra ( Ophiophagus hannah ) is the world's longest venomous snake, capable of reaching up to 18 feet in length. Far from being a traditional cobra, it is the only snake that actively builds nests for its eggs and possesses venom strong enough to kill an adult elephant(!) --Google
From The Lonely Camo
In late May 2017, a pair of bald eagles in Sidney, British Columbia, raided a red-tailed hawk nest, carried two hawk chicks back to their own nest, and dropped them in with three eaglets. One chick was eaten. The other one bounced up and started begging for food.
The adult eagles fed it. They raised it alongside their own young for the rest of the season. It fledged successfully on June 22. Birders nicknamed it Spunky. The mayor of Sidney proclaimed Bald Eagle-Hawklet Day.
The nest sat on Summerset Place in Roberts Bay, inside the Shoal Harbour Migratory Bird Sanctuary about thirty kilometers north of Victoria. The eagle pair had been nesting at that specific location for twenty-six years. They were experienced parents that typically raised two or three eaglets per season. They were also efficient predators. Red-tailed hawks nest in the same territory, and bald eagles regularly prey on hawk chicks.
The dominant theory among the biologists who studied the case is that the adults hit a hawk nest, grabbed both chicks, and brought them home to feed their eaglets. Somewhere between arrival and consumption, the surviving hawk chick opened its mouth and screamed.
That scream is what flipped the switch. David Bird, an emeritus professor of wildlife biology at McGill University who was living in Sidney at the time, told CBC that the hawk bounced up and started begging for food right away. The begging posture, the open mouth, the upturned beak, all of it closely resembles what an eaglet does when it wants to be fed. The adult eagles' parental instincts fired. Instead of tearing the hawk apart, they stuffed fish into its mouth.
The hawk was roughly three weeks old when it was first spotted in the nest. The eaglets were around nine weeks. The size difference was enormous. A red-tailed hawk is about one-quarter the size of a bald eagle, and these eaglets already had weeks of growth on the newcomer. Experts predicted the eaglets would kill it through sibling aggression, the way larger raptor chicks routinely kill smaller nest mates. Spunky survived.
David Hancock of the Hancock Wildlife Foundation, who monitored the nest with video cameras, said the hawk had one thing in its favor: proof to be a survivor. Most eaglets are aggressive. This hawk proved that audacity gets you some things.
Spunky ate what the eagles ate. It developed what Hancock described as an eagle-like affinity for fish, a food that red-tailed hawks do not normally hunt. It was observed stealing a flounder from one of the eaglets and flying away from the nest with it. It also displayed mantling behavior, spreading its wings over food to hide it from the other birds, a hawk instinct that eagles do not typically use. It was a hawk acting like an eagle in some ways and a hawk in others, sorting out an identity crisis in real time at the top of a tree in a suburban bird sanctuary.
The real question biologists raised was not whether Spunky would survive the nest. It was what would happen after. Bald eagles migrate north to Alaska after the breeding season. Red-tailed hawks do not. They stay in the region and hunt rodents, rabbits, and snakes. Spunky had been raised on fish by eagles that were about to leave for a destination hawks do not follow. Its adoptive family was going to fly away, and the hawk would need to figure out how to be a hawk with no hawk to teach it. Hancock did not give up hope that the young hawk's instincts would eventually override the eagle programming.
Spunky fledged on June 22 and left the nest area. The mayor of Sidney, Steve Price, who lived directly across the street from the nest tree, threw a block party. Birders who had been coming from around the world to watch the nest through telescopes attended. Hotels and restaurants in Sidney reported a measurable boost from the foot traffic.
The story did not end in Sidney. This was the third case Hancock had documented of bald eagles raising red- tailed hawk chicks. In 2022, it happened again on Gabriola Island near Nanaimo, BC. Webcam footage captured the exact moment: a mother eagle dropped a hawk chick into the nest as food for her eaglet. The chick hit the nest, came alive, and started begging. By nightfall the mother was feeding both birds equally. The eaglet watched the whole thing and did nothing.
A bald eagle can kill a red-tailed hawk in seconds. It outweighs the hawk by a factor of four. It takes hawk chicks from the nest as prey on a regular basis. But the begging call of a raptor chick works across species lines. The mouth opens, the head tilts back, the cry goes up, and something in the adult predator's brain reads it as offspring instead of food. The difference between a meal and an adoption is one sound made at the right moment by an animal small enough to be swallowed whole. Spunky made the sound. The eagle that carried it home to be eaten raised it instead, fed it fish for six weeks, and watched it fly away into a life it was never supposed to have.
Source: Hancock Wildlife Foundation. CBC News, August 2017. National Geographic, July 2017. Washington Post, June 2017. BBC News, June 2017. American Eagle Foundation. David Bird, McGill University
This ladybug obligingly held still while I took a stack of focus bracketed images at, apparently, ƒ/3.2 and 1/100 sec according to the EXIF data. (Don’t look at me, I was in Fv mode.) This is hand held, and it’s always equal parts pleasing and mildly suspicious how well Helicon manages to line all the images up afterwards.
Bonus homework:
https://lemmy.world/post/48346551Open linkView original on piefed.socialcross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/62028997
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/see-the-first-ever-photographs-of-cozumels-elusive-dwarf-fox-one-of-the-rarest-canids-in-the-world-180988961/Open linkView original on lemmy.worldFrom Rick McCulley
A albino wallaby. No its not a proud male 😊 but a female with a young one inside her pouch all except for its tail. 🤣🤣
Tennessee Safari Park
Photo by Chee Kee Teo.
This seems to come from the 'Funny Wildlife Photo Winners' from 2021:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/11/19/funny-wildlife-photo-winners-2021/8681527002/
Found Spew's story, and it has some crazy details!
"Spew " the second Turkey Vulture chick to hatch from the pair of eggs we admitted at the Illinois Raptor Center. We've had some problems with this little guy. First of all it hatched almost 28 hours after the first one ("Hurl "). The chick at two weeks old is literally half the size of the first one. It's not dimorphism (size difference between sexes ). This little bird is a runt. " Hurl " isn't exactly the nicest sibling. To be honest Hurl is a massive jerk. I've had to remove Spews head out of his mouth many times! Vultures bite and violently twist when they scavenge dead creatures in the wild. They can do this from day one! Spew got injured eventually. Good thing they're being raised at a rehab center! We've separated spew for now and tended to a couple of cuts. So far things are looking better for him!
In this picture you can see a massive bulge under the beak. That is the chicks crop. The crop is completely full of food (which is smeared on the beak too). The chick can rest and slowly push food into the gizzard from crop.
Crazy stuff!
"Hurl " one of the Turkey Vultures hatched from eggs at the Illinois Raptor Center. This chick is exactly 2 weeks old in this picture.
Our attempt to not imprint these chicks has paid off! When I went to get this one it threatened me like you wouldn't believe. Stretched out wings (nubs in this case), low body posture, and lots of hissing went on when I was trying to document age and size.
All that behavior is awesome! It means the chick does not associate my form or voice with food or another vulture! I think we did it which means a great prognosis for release!
Soon both chicks will be introduced to their foster dads - "Watto and Anikin."
Turkey vulture babies start out with black faces, and this tricked me the first time we got one in. The black face and smaller size had me thinking someone marked it down incorrectly, as it looked like a Black vulture. After I was taught they start off black, then it was easy to pick out the very different nostrils/beak and less bumpy head to confirm it was indeed a Turkey vulture.
From Carlos A Carmona
Iceland's only predator, the Arctic Fox. Babies are just too cute playing nonstop.
