Cute and Wholesome Picture Thread

[Jubal]

Recentish ones (about 10 days ago) from the Vienna woods

This I think is a female blackcap, just a cute shot:



Two battle tanks of their kind - a lesser stag beetle (or possibly a female greater stag), and an absolutely humongous boar:


On the floral side there were some nice columbines around the place:


And some other fun flowers as well:


Possibly the real treat of the trip was this black woodpecker which was bizarrely unfazed by me taking a ton of shots of it - I guess not much would really threaten them, they're the size of a crow almost and not many animals will want to take on something that big armed with a very large drill on its face. It was happily hopping around poking into bits of dead wood for food.


And also some of the nicest kestrel shots I've ever managed to get, this one was also quite obliging and did a bit of preening while I watched.


All in all a good trip


Also from today, spoilered in case any arachnophobes are reading, I found a SUPER cute little zebra/jumping type spider on my terrace:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Leafly]

These photographs are brilliant So many animals and plants, how cool!! What type of camera do you use Jubal?

[Jubal]

I use a Panasonic Lumix DC-TZ90. It's a very nice little compact camera - not too big and heavy, decent automatic systems. I rarely if ever play around with settings much, I probably should do: generally I'm just reliant on getting fairly close to the animals.

Another walk, this time on the Donauinsel at the north end of the island:

Essex skipper. V similar to Small Skipper, but this has black antenna tips so is Essex.	Frog, probably pool frog though I can't tell pool and marsh frogs apart easily.
Silverwashed fritillary, one of the bigger butterflies around.	A great banded grayling, Brintesia circe: this was a new species for me. Very goth looks.
A Marbled White butterfly: these were very common & on the wing everywhere.	A nine spotted moth, also known as yellow-belted burnet. Not something I was v familiar with: very chic "modern household" looks somehow.
The nest of a penduline tit, probably the young have some time since fledged. These are really beautifully crafted hanging structures that the birds make. Sadly I didn't see any penduline tits whilst there, but it's nice to know they're around.	A self explanatory mute swan. There was a flock of about fifty on the side-stream of the Danube when I was there. Fifty birds isn't a big flock for most things, but fifty swans is an impressive looking flotilla.

[Leafly]

What a fantastic amount of animals and wildlife that you can see without travelling too far! The photos do look great, high quality and professional. You can see a lot of detail of these animals and insects. Great work Jubal! You take some awesome pictures and the ways these were presented on the white/grey background looks cool too! 

[Jubal]

Highlights from another trip to Perchtoldsdorfer Heide, mostly butterflies:

A scarce swallowtail. One of the largest butterflies I've ever seen in the wild, and very impressive.	A clouded yellow butterfly.
A rock grayling or wood grayling, hard to say which.	Another rock or wood grayling, sharing its flower with a bee.
A hovering kestrel - they tend to hang very still in the air and drop rapidly to catch small mammals.	A landed kestrel observes the landscape below.
I think this is a smallish silverwashed fritillary.	A speckled wood butterfly.

[Jubal]

I feel like I have kind of taken this thread over with wildlife photography. Should I make a separate thread for that?

Anyway, I went to Meidling cemetery and there were HAMSTERS! They're very visible, I went at 5pm and saw plenty in the hour and a half after that, mostly wandering around foraging. They're not super easy to photograph given that they're often moving, quite skittish, and tend to forage near to their burrows so can disappear rapidly and easily. However, with patience some will stay relaxed enough for one to get within a metre or so at which distance even my camera can get some pretty good shots. They also have a taste for grave candles on top of their standard diet of grass seeds and suchlike, presumably because of the high fat/oil content.


I also got a video of one foraging on the ground:

And of the one I saw having a go at a candle:

[Tusky]

Awwwwww. They are very sweet looking critters.

Nice shots!

[Jubal]

Yes! Unfortunately their populations are collapsing globally. They recently got IUCN red listed as critically endangered with some estimates suggesting the species may not survive into the middle of this century

[Leafly]

Beautiful! They look so cool!!!

[Jubal]

Hard to follow the hamsters, but a few things from a walk to the Danube wetlands:

A photogenic heron who was good about staying still while I took this:



A dryad butterfly, which as the name implies is a woodland species - fairly big, somewhat understated in colouration but pretty all the same and impressive when flapping around the place in decent numbers:



And some European pond tortoises. I'd seen painted turtles, a feral species common in Europe, on the Donauinsel in the past, and I'd seen tortoises in the Danube wetlands once before but hadn't clocked what species they were at the time, so it was nice to confirm that this native species was present in the near part of the wetlands. (To tell the difference - painted turtles have stripy faces, as do the other main feral species, the red-eared slider, whereas European pond tortoises have the spotty colouration shown).

[Jubal]

Aaaaand time for another dump of cute animals

First, from home - this greenfinch visited my birdfeeder quite a bit recently. It's a juvenile, as shown by its very streaky/spotty breast colouration.


The rest of these are from a walk up through the vineyards and woods north of Vienna which I did yesterday. Didn't get many birds - one frustrating sighting of a woodpecker which was too quick to get the identifying details, and occasional common small birds - but this nuthatch while I was having lunch was nice to see.



I had a range of butterflies on the walk - brown argus, meadow brown, silverwashed fritillary, and a very ragged (half-dead honestly) scarce swallowtail coming to the end of its life.


There were a few interesting beetles too - some sort of shield bug, and some rather larger beetle (beetle ID is not something I know where to get started on for the most part).


Back in the lepidoptera, people often think of moths just as night-fliers, but there are some big impressive day flying ones too - this is a Jersey Tiger, similar in size to most butterflies and very impressive.


This was perhaps the nicest thing of the day though: some sort of underwing moth, with fantastic tree camouflage as you can see from the first picture. The first three are all the same individual, I think the last might have been a different one but likely the same species, and you can see the eponymous bright underwing section which is hidden under the dull camouflage of the upper wing.

[Leafly]

These are some quality photos and all of your previous ones. It must be so cool to see all of these creatures on a walk and totally awesome that you can tell which species are which. Always the coolest photographs, thank you for posting these they're lovely Jubal!! 

[Gmd]

love all thes widlife pics

[Jubal]

I recently realised I hadn't posted in here in months, so here are some highlights from the later part of 2020:

A young boar (late August)	A hamster with acorns (September)
Hamster peering round a grave (September)	A green woodpecker (September)
A spotted flycatcher (September)	A kingfisher (September)
A little bittern (September)	A tree sparrow (October)
A crested tit (October)	A female black redstart (October)
A lesser-spotted woodpecker (November)	A roe deer (December)

And a wholesome but non-widlife image in the form of the tiny snowman I made on impulse today since we had a decent snowfall here in Vienna

[Jubal]

Update! Yes, it's a ton more wildlife photos, what did you expect?

Two favourites from recently and then I've spoilered a bunch of the rest in case I'm making this thread hard to scroll (in which case apologies). I now have two cameras which is nice - the new one is a rather heavier-duty model, offering 65x zoom, a big advantage over the 30x my old one has. It does have some drawbacks: unlike my little camera which has a touchscreen and tap-point focus, the focus on the big camera is a clunkier procedure which is quite tricky when trying to get smaller bird pictures sharp. The angling of the screen is also less good so for shots where I'd need to crouch for a flower or invertebrate the little camera still has uses. However, the new one has come into its own rather for much of this update, because January and February is waterfowl season on the Danube as all the winter migrants are here, so being able to zoom for much better pictures of mid-channel birds is a big advantage.

And thus, pictures.

This is probably the most special bird of the winter: I did what will probably be my last winter-waterfowl walk of the year back on Tuesday, and I'd been umming and aahing over whether to do that or head to somewhere more inland to see if the warmer weather had awoken some flowers and sousliks yet. I eventually decided to have one more go at the Donauinsel walk and was rewarded with a sighting of a male smew, the first time I've ever seen one. I saw a female paddling around with some goosanders a week or so earlier which was the first time I'd seen the species (interestingly the German name for them is pretty literally "dwarf merganser" which makes more sense looking at the females next to one another). The male is really very distinctive anyway, as you can see, with an extremely fancy looking head crest. I was quite pleased with the picture given it's quite a small duck and was in the middle of the channel so right at the end of where my zoom could get even with the new camera.


This is less interesting for the bird and more just for the light on the water - the bird in silhouette is a little grebe, which are very small and fluffy denizens of the Danube, here all year round I think but much more visible in winter. The light quality was just really nice, I thought.



And if you want yet more from recent months, here they are:

JANUARY

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[size=13pt]A black woodpecker forages for food:[/size]	Some goosanders, larger fish-eating ducks:
A teal, one of the smaller Danube ducks:	Sleepy tufted duck:
Heron in the Alte Donau heronry:	Heron in the Alte Donau heronry, possibly displaying:
Kestrel on a lamp-post top:

FEBRUARY

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Icicles from a reed-stem looking like a xylophone for gnomes:	More of the goosanders:
Another male teal (the colour is named after the bird's eye-stripe):	A fish-eating cormorant, the "crow of the sea":
Some Pochard - always a favourite of mine with beautiful chestnut heads:	And a whole flotilla of the same:
Cormorant again - they swim very low in the water indeed:	And another looking rather grumpy:
A little grebe, one of the smallest waterfowl of the Donau:	And its great crested cousin from a distance:
A group of smew:	And another nice shot of the male: