Photo of the Month Gallery - WiNZ Photography

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Photo of the Month Gallery

The beauty of nature photography is that it can become "surprise photography," capturing some rare and unusual moments that are well worth sharing. The Photo Of The Month Gallery is an annual collection of images and accounts with like-minded enthusiasts who were kind enough to share some of their inspirational moments on the PotM Calendar.
February 2025

Birds on a Wire by Roger Cox
Leysdown on Sea, Isle of Sheppey
As winter turns to spring, field posts strung with barbed wire become boundary lines and feeding spots for a small dark-hooded bird about the size of a robin with a song reminiscent of *two stones hitting each other.
As the breeding season begins, pairs of stonechats flit back and forth between the ground and wired field posts, hunting for seeds and insects, claiming territory (as power couples do) to let others know that some corner of a farmer’s field, that is forever England, is now exclusively theirs – farming practices permitting.
 Males in full breeding plumage are striking, bearing a black head and throat, a white half-collar, a white rump, and an orange-red breast. Females are paler but no less given to perching in places of prominence, as if to spy out even more land to expand their UK range and distribution – a notion not so far-fetched, considering what they’ve accomplished in the last 20 years by the chatter they’ve sent by post and wire along the boundaries of our agricultural fencing.
From their western strongholds in Devon and Cornwall, they've crept north and eastwards all from making an exhibition of themselves, venturing as far as The Isle of Sheppey to cover 80% of our countryside – a feat encouraged by milder winters and a nationwide wire-fenced network that has steered them away from annual migrations to exploit fields much like this one, all year round.

*Recorded by Paul Kelly, courtesy of xeno-canto


January 2025

A Tail of the Unexpected by Roger Cox
Egypt – a land of antiquity founded on the rocky desert plains of North Africa bordering the southern sands of the Sahara. West of the Nile Valley, a vast, arid, stony region fit only for those animals and plants with specific adaptations to call such gravel-laden wastelands home. Among them is the Egyptian spiny-tailed lizard, a member of the uromastyx1 or thorny-tailed lizard family, a.k.a, mastiguires1. These highly sought solitary reptiles, with large, powerful jaws, are oviparous2 omnivores – found throughout the Northern deserts of Africa, Iran, India, and Pakistan.
Deep, within their burrows females can tend up to twenty hatchlings for several weeks. At first, the youngsters feed on invertebrates but soon develop a taste for vegetation with the help of symbiotic gut flora, which they obtain by ingesting their parents' faeces!
Left undisturbed, individuals can grow up to 90 cm in length and live for several decades – a testament to their resilience under the severity of desert life. However, when unsettled, they not only hiss loudly but can also deliver a nasty bite and unexpectedly use their long, barbed tails to lash out the faces of burrow intruders when threatened or improperly handled. Sadly, from the few population studies conducted for their conservation, the Egyptian uromastyx is now on the IUCN Red List as vulnerable primarily due to habitat loss and its harvesting for food, Chinese medicine, and the pet trade.

1.  From the Ancient Greek “oura,” meaning tail, and “mastiga” meaning whip or scourge. This refers to the spiny tails that uromastyx lizards have and use to defend themselves.
2.  Producing mature eggs that immediately hatch once expelled from the body.

Is wildlife or nature photography something you’re passionate about? If you have a story to tell with a stand-out picture you’d like to share, we've plenty of wall space here in our gallery.
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