Tag: Peacocks

The Eyes Have It

In this week’s Nature Photo Challenge #2, Denzil has us hunting for eyes. That’s a bit tough, isn’t it, photos of eyes?

We’ll go back to last week’s peacock for a bit of help:

And there’s another kind of peacock who can help us: a peacock butterfly.

Here’s another butterfly with eyes to dismay predators: a Gatekeeper.

Since I’ve never been to the Amazonian Rainforest, I’ve never seen an Owl Butterfly in its natural habitat. But they have circled round me at the Butterfly House of London’s Horniman Museum, unnerving me with all those ‘eyes’ they have..

After all these dissembling eyes, it seems only fair to show two real ones. The header photo shows a fallow deer at Knole, Kent, and here is an elephant at Dubare Elephant Camp on the River Cauvery in India.

A Pride of Peacocks

These peacocks live in North Macedonia, where they have, uninvited but none the less welcome, taken up residence at the hotel we stayed at on the shores of Lake Ohrid, St. Naum. I think they can speak for themselves – as they did, very noisily, every morning.

The rear view proved just as interesting as that draped tail.

… for a few moments – at rest.

And now … a peacock in action. Not for nothing is one of its collective nouns an Ostentation of Peacocks.

I’ll be honest. I conceived and wrote this post as a Monday Portrait. But then Tina’s Lens-Artists Challenge dropped into my in-box: ‘The eyes have it’. I’m not entirely sure she had peacocks in mind, but the hundreds of ‘eyes’ that make up the peacock’s tail, and that slightly penetrating gaze displayed in that head shot allowed me to think I might get away with including this post in the challenge.