Entry tags:
Wildlife Photograper of the Year
[2018] [2017]
First visit this year now made, with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
swaldman As Is Traditional. Rather to my surprise this year's offerings didn't contain anything I looked at and thought I want that as my wallpaper, albeit this is in part because my favourites were largely very bright backgrounds, which is Not What I Want in that context.
My selected highlights: Argentine Quickstep, which put me immediately in mind of the Pixar short Piper; Mister Whiskers; Sinuous Moves; Fitting the Bill (I'm a sucker for shit tiny dinosaurs, okay); Trailblazer, which put me inexorably and delightedly in mind of those Classic Long-Exposure Photos of motorways; Dinner for Two, which I love mostly because BLUE DRAGON NUDIBRANCHES rather than because I actually care much for the photo; Ahead in the Game [content note: carnivores]; A Rock in a Hard Place; Night Flight; City Fisher (I am seriously considering buying a print of this and sticking it up on a wall somewhere in the house); Ice-Blue Caves; the Portfolio award (amazing insect portraits); Fox Meets Fox; Pipe Owls.
Pictures that prompted me to talk about rocks: Night Snack (orcas: controversy over classifying distinct groups as distinct species, where communication and dietary behaviours are consistent within but not between groups; this leads to rocks via an explanation of being able to tell things about whales' diets by the isotopic make-up of their baleen and wax ear plugs, which in turn leads to "and that's how we can work out stuff about palaeoclimate"); ice as a sediment (in sufficiently cold places, which gives you rippled patterns formed by the wind just like you see in sand dunes, which in turn is why the interior structure of icebergs -- see below, under bears -- are indistinguishable in terms of morphological features from desert-produced sandstones and the patterns you can commonly see in sandstone building stone). (Occupational hazards of going around pretty much any natural-history-adjacent exhibition: I will tell you about rocks.)
Things learned: ground finches in the Galapagos will drink the blood of other birds, who... put up... with this; not all woodpeckers peck wood; wasps roll up little balls of mud then make nests out of them; the welwitschia plant lives for up to 1000 years and only ever grows two leaves; rooks and other corvids fumigate themselves with human-produced smoke sources to kill off pests, as a learned behaviour.
Bears: Bear Territory, a teenage brown bear; A Bear On The Edge, which also belongs in the pictures-that-prompted-me-to-talk-about-rocks category; Crossing Paths; Night of the Bear; A Polar Bear's Struggle.
First visit this year now made, with
swaldman As Is Traditional. Rather to my surprise this year's offerings didn't contain anything I looked at and thought I want that as my wallpaper, albeit this is in part because my favourites were largely very bright backgrounds, which is Not What I Want in that context.My selected highlights: Argentine Quickstep, which put me immediately in mind of the Pixar short Piper; Mister Whiskers; Sinuous Moves; Fitting the Bill (I'm a sucker for shit tiny dinosaurs, okay); Trailblazer, which put me inexorably and delightedly in mind of those Classic Long-Exposure Photos of motorways; Dinner for Two, which I love mostly because BLUE DRAGON NUDIBRANCHES rather than because I actually care much for the photo; Ahead in the Game [content note: carnivores]; A Rock in a Hard Place; Night Flight; City Fisher (I am seriously considering buying a print of this and sticking it up on a wall somewhere in the house); Ice-Blue Caves; the Portfolio award (amazing insect portraits); Fox Meets Fox; Pipe Owls.
Pictures that prompted me to talk about rocks: Night Snack (orcas: controversy over classifying distinct groups as distinct species, where communication and dietary behaviours are consistent within but not between groups; this leads to rocks via an explanation of being able to tell things about whales' diets by the isotopic make-up of their baleen and wax ear plugs, which in turn leads to "and that's how we can work out stuff about palaeoclimate"); ice as a sediment (in sufficiently cold places, which gives you rippled patterns formed by the wind just like you see in sand dunes, which in turn is why the interior structure of icebergs -- see below, under bears -- are indistinguishable in terms of morphological features from desert-produced sandstones and the patterns you can commonly see in sandstone building stone). (Occupational hazards of going around pretty much any natural-history-adjacent exhibition: I will tell you about rocks.)
Things learned: ground finches in the Galapagos will drink the blood of other birds, who... put up... with this; not all woodpeckers peck wood; wasps roll up little balls of mud then make nests out of them; the welwitschia plant lives for up to 1000 years and only ever grows two leaves; rooks and other corvids fumigate themselves with human-produced smoke sources to kill off pests, as a learned behaviour.
Bears: Bear Territory, a teenage brown bear; A Bear On The Edge, which also belongs in the pictures-that-prompted-me-to-talk-about-rocks category; Crossing Paths; Night of the Bear; A Polar Bear's Struggle.
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(The rock of where I live is 800 feet below.)
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<3! Thank you for saying :)
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AREN'T they!