cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/12140367

A window on the wild: The best of British wildlife photography | Country Life

It's boxing day for the brown hares of Bintree in Norfolk, captured in Sarah Darnell's 'The Fur Flew'

(Image credit: Sarah Darnell/British Wildlife Photography Awards)

Hello petal: A shower of pollen is scattered by a foraging bee illuminated in the glow of the sun in Alison Bell's highly commended 'A Kind of Magic'.

(Image credit: Alison Bell/British Wildlife Photography Awards)

A camouflaged flower crab spider blends in with the colour of the blooms in the hope of ambushing any unsuspecting bees, moths and other insects in Adam Ferry's 'Waiting on a Daisy'.

(Image credit: Adam Ferry/British Wildlife Photography Awards)

Turning heads: Cate Barrow attracts the icy stare of a short-eared owl in her 'Upside Down Owl'

(Image credit: Cate Barrow/British Wildlife Photography Awards)

More than 250 of the winning and shortlisted images are published in 'British Wildlife Photography Awards Collection 14' (£35, Graffeg Books). Entries are now open for the 2027 competition.

(Image credit: British Wildlife Photography Awards)

Trouble afoot: A plucky juvenile starling struggles to escape the clutches of a sparrowhawk in Mark Parker's 'Nemesis', winner of the Animal Behaviour category.

(Image credit: Mark Parker/British Wildlife Photography Awards)

'So glad you could come': A dew-doused azure damselfly appears to beckon the viewer through a nibbled leaf that forms Lee Frost's 'Nature's Window'.

(Image credit: Lee Frost/British Wildlife Photography Awards)

Someone to look up to: A fox cub is a study in adoration under the watchful care of its mother in Victor Soares's 'Admiration in a Fox's Eyes'.

(Image credit: Victor Soares/British Wildlife Photography Awards)

When time flies: A flurry of feathered seeds dances from the shaken head of a delicate dandelion clock as a bank vole contemplates sinking its teeth into the stem in Paul Williams's 'Zephyr'.

(Image credit: Paul Williams/British Wildlife Photography Awards)

Flyleaf: a patchwork leaf-cutter bee in Chris Jackson's 'Bringing in the Leaves', which was highly commended in the Hidden Britain category. The bees cut discs out of greenery and glue them together with saliva to build cells to house their larvae.

(Image credit: Chris Jackson/British Wildlife Photography Awards)

Small sand dollar.

This tiny purple blossom is a Sea Purslane flower. About the size of a US dime.

Federally protected in the US by the Migratory Bird Act of 1918, possession of brown pelican feathers is a major no-no. Migratory Bird Act was a mostly direct response to the decimation of bird populations so ladies could have a hat adorned with feathers. The law makes zero differentiation between feathers fallen off a fully healthy, living bird as part of natural processes, and one that you acquired from shooting and killing the bird.

Brown Pelicans were nearly killed off due to DDT, until it was outlawed. Since DDT bioaccumulates in their food web, the pelicans were laying eggs with shells so thin due to DDT that just during the process of incubation the parents would invariably crush their eggs. The banning of DDT allowed the bird to be removed from the Endangered Species List in 2009.

I think Brown Pelicans might be my favorite bird.

A couple of the maybe two dozen Lettered Olive Snail shells I found today.

Lettered Olive Snails are carnivorous. They spend their time mostly burrowing through the sand looking for bivalves, worms, clams, other snails, etc. They use their foot for tunneling just under the surface of the sand. When they find a clam they sort of surround the clam and suffocate it. When the shell opens because the animal dies, the snail takes advantage.

I don't find many of these, but like most shells I just toss them back after I get a few photos. The smaller hermit crabs like the Thinstripe and Longwrist use these smaller shells so I usually leave them on the beach.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/63708

President Donald Trump's administration on Friday paved the way for letting US corporations destroy the habitats of endangered species by rescinding a longtime interpretation of the Endangered Species Act.

As reported by The New York Times, the Interior Department and the Commerce Department announced that they were narrowing the law's definition of what constitutes harming endangered species.

Whereas the law has for decades been interpreted as protecting endangered animals' habitats from significant "modification or degradation," the administration said that offenders would have to directly injure or kill an endangered animal to be considered in violation of the law.

"The change could open the door for fossil fuel companies, agricultural interests, land developers, and others," wrote the Times, "to disturb or even destroy the habitats of vulnerable species."

The Endangered Species Act has been interpreted as protecting animals' habitats for decades, and that interpretation upheld by the US Supreme Court in 1995.

Environmental advocates expressed horror in response to the rule change, which they said would put endangered species at unprecedented risk.

Kristen Boyles, attorney for Earthjustice, vowed that the administration would face legal challenges for its rule change, which she said would jeopardize endangered animals' ability to "raise their young, or search for food."

"Let’s be clear: There is no support for the Trump Administration’s rule—no scientific support, no legal support, no public support," Boyles said. "We will see the Trump Administration in court."

Ben Greuel, wildlife campaign manager at the Sierra Club, called the rule changed "a direct attack on the foundation of the Endangered Species Act" that, if kept in place, would put species "on a path to extinction."

"This rule ignores that reality in an unlawful attempt to open the door for corporate polluters to degrade vitally important habitats, wildlife be damned," Greuel emphasized. "The Endangered Species Act is a bedrock law that must be followed."

Tara Zuardo, a senior campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity, pointed out that "habitat destruction is the number one threat to endangered species," while calling the Trump administration's new policy "a death knell for America’s wildlife."

"If animals don’t have a place to live, they can’t live," Zuardo said. "Spotted owls, Atlantic salmon, Florida panthers, and thousands of other species need protections for the wild places where they make their homes."

Andrew Bowman, president and CEO of Defenders of Wildlife, accused the Trump administration of embracing an "erroneous and nonsensical interpretation" of the Endangered Species Act that he vowed to challenge in court.

"We intend to fight back with the full force of the law," said Bowman, "to defeat this attack and innumerable others by the administration on the statutes and regulations that protect America’s cherished wildlife."

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

Here we see chinese spring water, Ganten, in its natural environment - a beach in south Texas. Nature provides.

Sea Whip coral. Looks a lot like some wire or some such trash washed up on shore. Also in photo, white things are tube worm casings that have calcified, and some coquina clam shells.

Article nerds

https://www.jornada.com.mx/noticia/2026/07/09/politica/analizara-scjn-reconocer-a-las-abejas-como-sujetos-de-derechos

Mexico City. The Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) will review an unprecedented case in which Mayan communities in the municipality of Hopelchén, Campeche, seek to have bees recognized as subjects of rights—a legal status that would allow their caretakers to go to court to defend them and demand that authorities take action to protect them and prevent their deaths.

The case—an amparo review proceeding (file number 790/2025)—was formally brought before the Supreme Court this Thursday at the proposal of Justices Hugo Aguilar Ortiz (President of the Court) and Irving Espinosa Betanzo; the decision passed with eight votes in favor and one against, cast by Justice María Estela Ríos González.

“It allows us to examine the ancestral relationship between the Mayan community and bees—specifically, whether indigenous communities can act as guardians of nature and, in that capacity, bring legal action on its behalf—as well as to evaluate the standard of state conduct regarding the ecological crisis,” said Justice Espinosa.

Justice Arístides Guerrero García noted that exercising jurisdiction over this case would enable the Court to establish a precedent recognizing the Melipona bee—which is closely linked to the economic and cultural identity of Mayan communities in the municipality of Hopelchén—as a subject of rights or a legal entity deserving of protection within the framework of the comprehensive safeguarding of indigenous peoples, who have maintained a historic relationship with this species.

Storms comin.

Hold on to your butts, comrades. We're about to get a preview of 2050. I just checked the live data, and the area off the coast of South America that is the index water for ENSO is 9° F above average in places. This is going to be a wild year.

Fields of grain sorghum aka milo as far as the eye can see. Cotton, milo, feed corn everywhere.

Sorghum gets used for a lot of stuff but the sorghum grown here is mostly used as feed for cattle and pigs, biomass for renewable diesel and biodiesel, and ethanol production for fuel adultering.

This particular part of the field is a week or so out from being harvested. It's still too orange/rusty looking. It'll turn a red/purple hue when it's fully ready. Corn was harvested last month. Cotton is probably next month. Most of the fields will go fallow until next summer but some of the currently fallow fields will get some cotton, Milo, or corn planted. It's hot enough here we have two growing seasons.

Went to a local park today to try a new-to-me camera lens. Its south texas so theres rattlesnakes everywhere as it is, but right now theyre extremely active with all the heat we’ve been having lately.

About thirty minutes after I took this photo, I actually came across a diamondback while out wandering some trails nearby the park I took the title photo at. I was walking, saw it and heard it at the same time. I stood there and watched it for about 10 seconds before it started to take off into the nearby brush and for a few seconds I totally forgot I had a camera in my hand I was so intent on just watching it. This is it, slinking back off into the brush. If you zoom in, you can see 7 rattles, so the snake is about 7 years old. It was bigger around than my wrist, about the size of 2” pipe at the widest part of it, and maybe 3 or 3-1/2 foot long. Not the biggest one I have seen, some of them get longer than I am tall, but this one is still big enough to wreck your day if you tried to do anything more than steer clear of it.

At a jetty/boat channel this evening and got there in time to see some green sea turtles eating dinner. There are a few of these big pink granite blocks (quarried in Marble Falls, Tx) that allow for the turtles to scoot up on to the flat surface, and munch the fresh algaes growing there. Barnacles in its back are called 'turtle barnacles' as they grown specifically on turtle shells.

This one is maybe an older juvenile. I think it's small for an adult but the way it's feeding is adult behavior. Until they become adults they are omnivores, they will eat jellyfish, fish, shellfish, etc. and it isn't until adulthood that it becomes an herbivore permanently.

Not the best photo, sorry.

Out here in the farmlands as the mailbox money the farmers depend on from a scattering of oil pumpjacks here and there dries up because the oil fields no longer sustain the draw in them a lot of the farmers turn to windmills on their fields for supplemental income instead. Roughly spaced about 15 acres apart.

For whatever reason, the power generated by this field isn't even distributed locally. Instead, it's gets sent 200 miles north to San Antonio and then further on to Austin.

Was trying out a new second hand lens at the local pond today and happened to catch a duck swimming around the pond, with a duck on its back, and that duck had a duck on its own back as well. I dont know how long they were like this before I saw them but I watched them for maybe a minute or two before they all split up.

Didnt make the beach this weekend, I ended up stomping around a estuary, a park, and a pond for a while instead. While out, I found eleven holes of what I assume must be a 18 hole disc golf course at a park that was mothballed due to budget issues. local city governance is an embarassment at managing its funds. Its so bad at management of things in general that we are actually suffering a water shortage severe enough that its made the national news.

The baskets are all in impeccable shape. I went and looked at a different one, and they are damn near new. There is nearly no surface rust even. I dont play disc golf but this is just sad to see.

A pair of Pekin ducks and a domestic goose.

Moderate sized Brown/Norway rat at the duck pond I was at earlier today. Dont see them out during the day too often like this. There was a couple of kids feeding the birds with bread who got asked to leave and as soon as they left this lil guy or gal showed up to snag some foods. Im getting girl rat vibes from this one, but its possible its a juvenile male and hasnt developed fully yet.

Stomping around the brush in a place that once upon a time used to be a alternate site for communication satellites for the apollo/mercury/gemini space missions. The satellites have long since been removed. Back in the 1990s when I used to ride dirt bikes back here the concrete pads for the satellites and a small CMU shack still stood. Everything has since been lost to time and overgrown. The area borders a small creek where we used to come drink beer and party during high school. There are now houses pretty damn close to the spot now, and in another ten years this will all be flattened and paved.

These are concrete storage tanks for sewage lift stations, in place for not too distant future needs. Once the neighborhood gets this far out, sewer will have to be pumped back up to a higher elevation to make its way to a treatment facility.

went to a local pond today, saw some birds. This adult ibis was one of them.