You must be delighted to be home again!

That’s harsh.

What a nightmare for the two of you. So glad to hear that you’ve at least made it back to your home country. It must be agonizing to wait out your quarantine and the lockdown, but hopefully you can at least wrap your hands around a beer again!

Glad you made it back to home turf. Thanks for all the nature photos!

Hi Jean-Marc and Leigh, How did you get on getting home? Indeed, are you home yet? We were very relieved to get back to our house on Tuesday. Our village is quite a different place to the one we left. Virtually no traffic on the roadside at least we can safely get out to do the shopping run by bicycle thereby combining our shopping needs with our daily quota of exercise. The place has a vigilante feel to it right now as residents complain about people driving somewhere to walk and not sticking to their own streets. Things on social media have turned quite nasty, somehow these things seem to bring out the best and worst of people. So many volunteering to help those trapped in their homes and NHS workers who had retired recently flooding back to help with the admissions.

Well, we both hope you are home and healthy. Please let us know! Email Elspmart2@gmail.com.

All the best

Elsp & Mart

Thanks Bill. We thought they might be tarantulas but looked a bit small. We were expecting something a bit more dramatic. They look very similar to what we call Baboon Spiders in South Africa , which it turns out are a sub-family of tarantulas.

Fall is mating time for tarantulas. The farther north (or in this case, south), the earlier it starts. Males roam about looking for females. Suddenly where it seemed none existed, they will be very common for a short while.

We used to catch lots of them when I was a kid in California in the 1960s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarantula

Thanks Bill. It would seem that the individual I saw would have been a very young snake. Glad I kept my distance.

It's pattern looks like an urutu lancehead, a dangerous viper.

https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/539037-Bothrops-alternatus

Never having been to South America, nor seen one in person, I cannot be sure. I agree the head does not look like a viper though, because it appears to be of similar width to the neck , but that could be camera angle. Snout appears down turned, not a viper characteristic, again camera angle could mask that. I see no typical pit by the nostril, but the angle of the picture could obscure that. It does have an elliptical pupil, another viper characteristic. Also the scales are keeled (tiny ridge along the middle of scales), which is another viper characteristic.

If I had seen it in person it would be easier to say for sure. From what I see though, I would stay back a few feet.

As for the vibrating tail, many snakes do that when agitated, both venomous and nonvenomous.

Hi Mike

I use a Panasonic Lumix GX8 combined with a Leica 100-400 F4.0/6.3 lens. This is the smallest camera that has acceptable enough autofocus for wildlife photography although it falls short of higher end models. Because it uses the Mirco Four-Thirds form factor, the lens is the equivalent of a 200-800mm on a full frame body but the combination of body and lens is a fraction of what a full frame DSLR and equivalent lens would be. There is YouTube video that gives a feel what it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfySSktrYJA

Regards
Jean-Marc

Apart from a lot of patience what camera and lense do you use?

Mike.

Nice bird photos!

That would have been a dream job for me! I ended up being a retired Explosives Safety Manager, and now a dozen years later, with bad knees limiting me to 10-20 miles a day unloaded, I spend a bit of time going along on other people's tours and using my Zoology degree background to help me search the net for nature IDs.

Yup, inaturalist is one of my go-to sites!

Keep up the good work! Enjoying your nature photography, even when I can't find a good ID.

Thanks for that Bill. By the way, my son is a big inaturalist fan. He is an environmental scientist and is fortunate enough to spend a lot of time in the field photographing plants, many of which he uploads to inaturalist.

Magnificent! Some species of Rothschildia giant silkworm moth.

https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/83223-Rothschildia