Favoritos de thedrw

hunting from nearby tree, about 10:30am, looking intently down at snow, then landed and mantled for a couple of minutes, burying its head into the snow several times before flying off in the opposite direction

Found in the middle of the trail, just a few yards down from where I found scat FULL of small turtle shell pieces (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/33742334)

Is that a tooth puncture in the egg? hmmm

Hood Mockingbird
AKA Espanola Mockingbird
Nesomimus macdonaldi
Group of Hood Mockingbirds
engaged in some sort of battle.
All left this scrap seemingly no
worse for the incident
Espanola Island
AKA Hood Island
Galapagos Islands,
Ecuador
20 August 2010

Three shots posted all taken at same time and place. 3rd shot shows one perched on my tripod head when I removed the lens to change lenses.

One of the 2 is fake - guess which one.

Solution for all who are still wondering: The plastic rattle snake has been put in the entrance of the camp kitchen as a deterrent against the local troop of Malbrouck Monkeys, which used to raid the stored food, and surprisingly they never ever entered the kitchen since then.

This skink, however, equipped with astounding cognitive abilities, shows off with his balls of steel.

Err, I think it's a female....

A scrappy expanse of silky refuges and capture webs littered with body parts of previous victims. When preferred prey is entangled, the female spiders emerge from their 'nests' and overpower it by grabbing its extremities. In this case, a wasp https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/9319446.
Presumably they inject venom because after a minute or so the prey stops struggling. Then they snip it out of the web and carry it into one of several 'nests' or refuges.
Unwanted prey, often beetles (see https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/9319435 ) are also killed but sometimes left in the web, uneaten. Ants, in this case, Maranoplus ( https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/9319390 )scavenge around the periphery of the webs, feasting on unwanted beetles or other left-overs.

Red-tailed Hawk, Buteo jamaicensis (Gmelin, 1788). RTHA. Near White Oak Fire Station, White Oak, Stafford Co., Virginia, USA. 2015 Christmas Bird Count, VA Brooke Circle (VABK) Sector VII. Photo by David L. Govoni ©2015.

Cornell: www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Red-tailed_Hawk/id
Audubon: www.audubon.org/field-guide/bird/red-tailed-hawk
EOL: eol.org/pages/1049057/overview
Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-tailed_Hawk