Readers’ wildlife videos

We have just one item today, but it’s a good one! Stephen Barnard has produced a wonderful video of Desi and Lucy, his resident bald eagles, and the two chicks they raised this year. It’s 12.5 minutes long, covers the whole breeding season, and is mesmerizing. Be sure to watch to the end. I won’t […]

ISIS explains why it fights: it’s the religion, stupid!

Listen up, Islamic apologists, especially those of you who claim that the main motivations of Islamist terrorism derive from Western colonialism rather from Islam. Listen up, Reza Aslan, Glenn Greenwald, Robert Pape, Karen Armstrong, and Nathan Lean: ISIS has explained in very clear language that you’re just wrong. It’s religion, stupid! After reading the article summarized in the 14½-minute […]

Readers’ wildlife photographs

Actually, we have a video today—from Tara Tanaka. Some of my favorite videos of hers are ones showing baby ducks plopping down into the water from high nesting boxes. In this case, it’s black-bellied whistling ducks (Dendrocygna autumnalis). You can find Tara’s main video page here. Beginning in mid-August of 2015, I was in my tiny blind, set […]

Friday wildlife: science gif “wildoff”

Matthew Cobb informs me that “Twi**er is having a #wildoff science gif competition. You can find the gifs here.” I’ll put up a few of the more impressive ones, but go have a look at the many submissions. Matthew thinks this one is the best. It’s damn good, but I always flinch at the sight of […]

Rubin report: Faisal Saeed Al Mutar and Melissa Chen

Faisal Saeed Al Mutar is the founder of the Global Secular Humanist Movement, and Melissa Chen helps him run it; they’re from Iraq and Singapore respectively. I’m proud to join them and others as a moderator of the Global Secular Humanist Movement Facebook page, which has a huge readership (336,000 “likes”) and, to our credit, has been […]

Readers’ wildlife videos

Tara Tanaka (flickr site here, Vimeo site here ) is brightening up our Friday with this lovely video of a determined brown thrasher (Toxostoma rufum) taking a bath. I’m hoping to put up one of her videos every Friday. Tara’s notes: I’ve been slowly, painfully working my way through over 400GB of video I shot since August – […]

Readers’ wildlife videos

It’s Saturday again, and we’ll take a break from photos to show readers’ videos. And by “reader,” I of course mean Tara Tanaka in Florida (Vimeo site here, flickr site here), from whose collection I’ve chosen two digiscoped clips. The first (“Bart tries to kill Billy, taken with the GH4”) is an attempted murder of one […]

Readers’ wildlife videos

As a Saturday special, I’ll show two digiscoped videos made by reader Tara Tanaka (Vimeo site here, photography site here).  The first shows male and female Northern Cardinals (Cardinalis cardinalis) bathing (note the sexual dimorphism), and a bonus vireo. Tara adds that if you follow the Vimeo link in the lower-right corner of the video and watch […]

Readers’ wildlife videos

As a Friday treat, I’ll put up two videos from among reader Tara Tanaka’s many wonderful digiscoped vignettes from Florida and elsewhere. Her Vimeo page, which has 188 videos, is here, and her Flickr site with photos is here. Tara’s notes are indented below. The first one, from June, 2014, shows a brood of wood ducks, Aix […]

Readers’ wildlife videos

Today we have two lovely videos from reader Tara Tanaka, a Floridian whose Vimeo channel is here. You can enlarge these (and you should enlarge these) by clicking on the four diverging arrows at the video’s lower right, which will take it to full screen, and then press “escape” to return here. The first is […]