Oh no. They’re not as interesting as spiders.
Downy Woodpecker
I’m not very good at it, either…but man, I tell you, shooting these great big bird beasts is a heck of a lot easier than taking macro shots of teeny-tiny fidgety invertebrates.
Maybe I need to tell Mary to take more photos of birds.
Could you compromise by meeting in the middle and photographing only spiders that are larger than the smallest living bird species and only birds that are smaller than the largest living spider species, respectively?
How much wood could a woodpecker peck if a woodpecker would peck wood?
What is the point of taking pictures of birds? Any species of bird you can name, pictures of it already exist, and can easily be located on the Internet.
What’s the point of taking pictures of anything? Throw all the cameras away.
You should try it with shaky hands, two bad knees and a crook back. Birds are much easier
@4
Yes!
My life improved greatly when I embraced Zen tourism, and started enjoying being places rather than taking photos so I could prove to others that I had been there.
@PZ
Do you see many owls around there? I’ve been reading Jennifer Ackerman’s What an Owl Knows and find it fascinating. Some species might process auditory info visually so they can pinpoint where prey are under snow and leaves. The various species are interesting but their hunting related adaptations are what I find amazing and how a smallish brain might have well organized tiny neurons though more clustered like cauliflower than layered like ours. Wulst I think it’s called. Plus the cochleae are super sensitive to timing differences and ears asymmetrically placed in the skull for some species. And the facial disk acts like a satellite dish for sound.
She’s talking about owls’ great locational memory due to their hippocampi. Is that a homologous area to ours or have they converged on functional brain anatomy?
Reginald Selkirk @3
It may go in the other direction if a decent photo can be matched to a database of other photos for identification purposes. I wonder how well Seek or the built in iOS photo app do at ID. Plus bird photos suck at ID compared to painted or illustrated plates right? I was never much of a birder. Harshman?
There is something to say about not literally dying for a selfie.
We do occasionally get owls around here.
Reginald Selkirk @6: I’ve no clue what’s Zen about it, but I definitely like riding trains for the experience itself; and there are often great views out the windows.
Reginald Selkirk #6
I have traveled to many places and took many, many, many photos.
I never showed them to anyone because that is not why I took them.
Birds must be cooler. Tom Lehrer never wrote any songs about spiders.
@ 2 Erlend Meyer
First of all you used a “could” instead of a “would”, ruining the homonym. But also the joke doesn’t work because they do peck wood. X-D
The original is making fun of the fact woodchucks don’t chuck wood.
@Hemidactylus #8
You rang? Never tried the ID methods you mention, but iNaturalist does a fair job as long as the photo is decent. It gets some wrong, but not too often. The best ID picture is a painting on which the important field marks have been pointed out, which is unfortunately not common. And many species can look annoyingly similar. Calls are handy, if the bird is vocal.
Spider relatives doing their thing.
“Scorpions ‘taking over’ Brazilian cities with reported stings rising 155%” | The Guardian
.https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/may/08/scorpion-stings-rise-brazil-cities-aoe
Cute photo of the woodpecker! Thanks for sharing.
Beautiful woodpecker!