PotM Calendar
The Photo of the Month (see gallery) is a year round calendar of selected nature images and stories with contributions from visitors, fellow photographers and friends.
When it comes to nature photography, it's not only those fascinating tales of high adventure that often accompany talent and skill for a fabulous result. If a picture is truly worth more than a thousand words then a well-timed shot, or a well framed one, can say just as much about you as a photographer too! So if you'd like to showcase one of your pictures here, free, for one calendar month with a short story on how you managed to come by it, then this page is for you.
October 2021
London Zoo, Regents Park
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Every picture tells a story, and every photographer has a story to tell. Care to share?
With three places left for 2021, the PotM Calendar is now closed until October18th.
To learn more about posting news, comments and events here under a PotM agreement, see our Terms of Use page where you can submit your photo (with story) during the last two weeks of every month.
I was walking alongside one of the ponds in Lea Valley Park
With three places left for 2021, the PotM Calendar is now closed until October 18th.
To learn more about posting news, comments and events here under a PotM agreement, see our Terms of Use page where you can submit your photo (with story) during the last two weeks of every month.
Well-Spotted by by Peter Flectcher
As I was walking to some local shops near the Galliards Estate, I heard a chick calling from one of the lime trees by Jubilee Parl. At first, I looked and looked...
With four places left for 2021, the PotM Calendar is now closed until October 18th.
Special annoucements or simple hellos. Place your message, link, advert or invite here as part of your PotM agreement.
Australia is well-known for its indigenous mammals. Yet comparatively little is known about the actual lives of its reptiles. Whilst dozens of Antipodean lizards, geckos, snakes and tortoises have made names for themselves in the exotic pet trade, their behaviour in the wild is still a mystery to most. One popular yet barely researched favourite of traders and collectors is the now captive-bred gidgee skink.
The gidgee or Stoke's skink is a medium-sized gregarious lizard that lives amongst the rocks and crevices of the desert regions of Central and Western Australia – though not exclusively an inhabitant of barren wastelands, since its also fond of colonising Acacia trees! However, in situations with few places to hide from predators, or the sun, contending as a group for shelter is always preferable to the odds of "going it alone." So perhaps for the shy and harmless gidgee, community life is more of a necessity rather than a choice.
Since food is often sparse, gidgees are active around the clock, eking out a diet forged by the extreme temperatures of the day. From invertebrates to vegetation, whatsoever the desert giveth, the gidgee taketh away. Including water, which they extract from whatever they can eat to store as fat in their non-detachable thick spiny tails. As for their heat-loving ways, perhaps a stoic determination, combined with their fiercely territorial behaviour, is what keeps them rooted to their basking spots when others prefer the shade — a disposition giving the impression that only gidgees like it hot.