{"id":585443,"date":"2026-08-06T23:44:45","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T23:44:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/585443\/"},"modified":"2026-08-06T23:44:45","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T23:44:45","slug":"readers-wildlife-photos-why-evolution-is-true-8","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/585443\/","title":{"rendered":"Readers\u2019 wildlife photos \u2013 Why Evolution Is True"},"content":{"rendered":"

We have only a few batches left, and I am baffled about why few submissions are coming in. Please, if you have photos and appreciate this site, send me some good ones. Thanks!<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s photos come from Marcel van Oijen in the Netherlands. His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.<\/p>\n

A Dutch Garden in Summertime<\/p>\n

Marcel van Oijen<\/p>\n

This summer we spent two weeks in the Netherlands, looking after the house of Nellie and Roel who count as both family and close friends. The following nine pictures were taken in their garden in the small town of Woudenberg, in the central Dutch province of Utrecht. Even though the Netherlands are just 700 km away from us (we live in Scotland on the opposite side of the North Sea), temperatures were about ten degrees higher there which made for much more varied wildlife.<\/p>\n

This is a Willow Emerald damselfly (Chalcolestes viridis<\/a>), recognisable from its brownish eyes. We never see damselflies or dragonflies in our garden here, so this was a huge and pleasant surprise:<\/p>\n

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Small White butterfly (Pieris rapae<\/a>). Very common on both sides of the pond:<\/p>\n

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Vagrant Darter dragonfly (Sympetrum vulgatum<\/a>). The species can be identified from its yellow-black legs, and its overall yellow colour tells us it\u2019s a female;<\/p>\n

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Red Admiral (Vanessa atalanta<\/a>). A very common butterfly also here in Scotland:<\/p>\n

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Another Pieris butterfly, a Green-veined White (Pieris napi<\/a>). I find the various Whites often difficult to photograph because they are so restless, but here they took their time feeding, maybe because the heat was too much even for them, or the flowers contained more nectar than usual?:<\/p>\n

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This European Garden Spider (Araneus diadematus<\/a>) was a joy to follow during our days in the garden, when it was making or repairing its web, or scurrying toward the foliage whenever I got too close. Here it is wrapping up some prey (a hoverfly perhaps) for dinner later.<\/p>\n

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The sky was not really this featureless white, but I overexposed this picture of a Blue Tit (Cyanistes caeruleus<\/a>) by two stops to make the picture look somewhat like a Chinese print:<\/p>\n

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And here is its larger cousin, a Great Tit (Parus major<\/a>), with tiny prey:<\/p>\n

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We finish with one of the most common hoverflies in Europe, a Marmalade Hoverfly (Episyrphus balteatus<\/a>). This photo was taken while sitting at the breakfast table in the garden, where they would be hovering near the same flowers every morning, so I could focus the camera first and then simply wait for one of them to appear in the right spot:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We have only a few batches left, and I am baffled about why few submissions are coming in.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":585444,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[61,60,82,263],"class_list":["post-585443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=585443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585443\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/585444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=585443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=585443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=585443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}