Sometimes God has a sense of humor.
I’ve spent a lot of years pointing a camera at wildlife, and here’s something the field guides leave out: animals are not taking any of this as seriously as we are. They yawn, they stretch, they fall asleep in ridiculous positions, they stare directly into the lens with an expression that can only be described as unimpressed. Every so often one of them does something so absurd that the only honest thing to do is add a caption.
This page is where those end up. Every photograph is my own, taken here in Portland and around Oregon. Nothing is staged and nothing is posed — I just happened to be standing there when the animal decided to be undignified.
And it isn’t only projection on my part. Play is real in the animal world — genuinely documented, not imagined. Ravens sled down snowy roofs and climb back up to do it again. Otters slide for the sake of sliding. Crows tease dogs. There is joy out there, and a fair amount of goofing off.
Laughter is medicine. I believe that as plainly as I believe anything — it’s the reason I make music, and it’s the reason this page exists. If one of these makes your day a little lighter, that’s the whole point. Take it, share it, send it to someone who needs it.
🎉 These memes are free — please take them
Download any of them, share them anywhere you like, put them in a group chat, post them on your own feed. All I ask is that you leave the watermark on and don’t sell them. That is the whole licence.
The photographs are a different matter — those are my work and they live in the shop. But the jokes belong to everybody.
How these are made. Every image on this page began as a photograph I took myself. Some have been worked on afterwards — AI rendering, compositing, upscaling, the occasional speech bubble — but there is no stock imagery here and nothing conjured out of a text prompt. The bird was real, I was standing there in the cold, and the shutter was mine. The joke is added later; the animal never is.
On a phone, “Share” opens your usual share sheet, so Instagram, TikTok and Messages are all in there. On a computer, download the image first — Instagram won’t accept a link.
Be loose as a gooseHe has folded himself into a feathered croissant, closed one eye, and made peace with it. Genuinely good advice from a bird who has never once been tense.
Evolved for 300 million years to look like this?In fairness to the dragonfly: he is a flawless aerial predator whose ancestors flew before the dinosaurs. He just happens to be hanging off a twig looking like a Disney Cartoon Character, staring right at me.
It’s not easy being greenKermit said it first, but the katydid means it literally — and he’s brought visual aids. Front legs up, antennae out, the entire planet behind him. Hard to argue with a spokesman that committed to the cause.
Behold the KatydidHalf a joke and half a dare. Get close enough to one of these and the punchline stops being funny — those speckled eyes are genuinely lovely. Most things are, if you get near enough to look.
The Original Red BaronHe’s earned the scarf. Dragonflies take down prey on roughly 95% of attempts — a kill rate no flying ace ever approached — and they don’t chase, they intercept, calculating where the target is going and meeting it there. Four independently-controlled wings, one more than the Baron’s triplane, and 300 million years of air superiority. Early aviation studied insects for a reason.
Peek-a-booA red-breasted sapsucker in my back yard, and this is the face of a bird who knows exactly what he did. Those holes in the trunk are his. The holes in the siding of my house — also his. When I came out with the camera he did what every guilty party does: got behind something and peeked out to check if I was still mad. He’s lucky he’s this handsome.
Sandpiper photo bomb.Taken from my kayak on the Willamette. The killdeer up front was giving me a dignified portrait — golden light, nice water, holding the pose — and at the exact moment I pressed the shutter, a sandpiper came through behind her with a full wing flare. Every group photo has one.
Live long and… aw, forget it.A peregrine falcon caught mid-preen, giving the Vulcan salute her best honest attempt. In her defense, the gesture is hard enough with fingers and she’s working with a foot. One try, a shrug, and she went back to being the fastest thing in the sky — when you can stoop at 240 mph, you don’t need warp drive.
The rejected heronDown at the graffiti wall, a great blue heron tries his pick up line and the great white egret files an immediate flight plan. “You seem a little fishy” is cold from a bird whose entire diet is fish — but rejection is part of the wading-bird experience. I know exactly what rejection is. He stood there a long time after she left. We have all been the heron.
Shout, shout, let it all out.A wood duck domestic dispute, scored by Tears for Fears. She’s taken the high ground and she is using all of it; down in the water, his thought bubble is cycling through the whole 1985 chorus — these are the things he can do without. He just kept paddling. Smart bird.
I see you.An osprey can spot a fish underwater from a hundred feet up, so she clocked me long before I clocked her. This is the exact head-tilt of a bird running facial recognition and not liking the result: same guy as last time, same camera. I took two frames and gave her the sky back.
Nature’s perfect camouflageThere is a western screech owl in this photograph. Feathers matched to the weathered snag line for line — gray on gray, grain on grain — and the whole disguise undone by a single yellow eye, cracked open just enough to say: seen. These owls sleep in plain sight all day while the neighborhood walks by. Finding one is less about looking and more about finally noticing.
Monday mornings be likeA western screech owl at Oaks Bottom, awake against his will, one eye open the minimum amount required by law. In fairness to him he works nights, so this is the middle of his sleep — and he is only sitting in the sun because it warms him up for free. But the face is universal. Somewhere out there is a bird who feels exactly the way you do at 7am, and he is also refusing to fully open both eyes about it.
Me, trying to blend inHere is the thing I did not notice until I made this: we are all wearing the same mask. The waxwing has that sharp black bandit stripe across the eyes. The raccoon has the full burglar version. I showed up in aviators. Three masked figures in the Oregon woods, and only one of us thought he was being subtle. In fairness to the raccoon, his mask is functional — the dark fur cuts glare, the same reason ballplayers smear black under their eyes — which is also, more or less, my excuse for the sunglasses. So I did blend in. Nobody was fooled, but I blended.
Did I make the right hair choice?Every man over fifty has stood at this exact crossroads: hair on, or hair off. Here is a great blue heron having the same crisis in public, at the water’s edge, with the plumes going in four directions at once. Two things in his defense. First, that hairdo is deliberate — those long head and back plumes are breeding finery, grown for the season and shown off on purpose, so he committed to the look. Second, look at what he is scratching with: a heron’s middle toe carries a pectinate claw, a genuine comb, serrated like the real thing and used for grooming. He is not scratching his head. He is styling. And he still isn’t sure.
Aerodynamics perfectedI labeled this one as a joke and then realized every label is true. Legs trailed straight back and tucked — landing gear retracted. Wings folded tight to the body — drag down to nothing. Neck stretched into a single line from bill to tail — the whole bird becomes one long airfoil, which is exactly what the fuselage of an aircraft is for. And the bill out front really is the guidance system: a heron’s neck has a specially hinged vertebra that lets it fire that spear forward faster than you can see it happen. Here is the part that should humble us — when Japanese engineers needed to stop their bullet train from booming out of tunnels, they redesigned the nose after a fish-hunting bird’s beak, and it worked. We keep patenting things that were already flying over the pond.
Flight check, wings intactHe really is running an inspection. Every flight feather is a row of barbs held together by microscopic hooks, and they come unzipped in normal use — so a bird runs each feather through its bill to hook them back together, then works in oil from a gland at the base of the tail to keep everything waterproof and flexible. A ragged feather costs real efficiency, and this is a bird that cannot afford a sloppy wing. Pre-flight checklist, performed daily, in better light than most of us get. Worth knowing too: those elegant plumes nearly cost the great white egret everything — they were slaughtered by the thousands to decorate hats, and the outrage over it helped launch the conservation movement that saved them. That is why the egret is on Audubon’s logo.
“People know who I am.”Same graffiti wall, same two birds, ongoing feud. First she turned him down; now she has taken his log, and she is doing it with the full Ron Burgundy. What sells it is that the pose is real — that wings-out spread is an actual territorial display, the way herons and egrets settle who gets the good fishing without anyone getting hurt. And here is the indignity: the great blue heron is the bigger bird, a foot taller and twice her weight. He could win this. He is not going to. He is just going to stand back there and narrate.
“At least I can say I was a flying fish.”Gallows humor from the last member of the food chain to get a vote. But here is the thing — the fish is not wrong. An egret cannot swallow a fish sideways; the fins and spines would catch going down. So it flips the fish in the air, sometimes several times, until it comes down lined up head-first. That means the final act of a fish’s life genuinely is a short solo flight, tossed above the water in the morning light. He got his wish. He should have been more specific.
Strike a poseThe comeback. She took his log and his catchphrase, so the heron went out and landed the cover. And look at him — he knows. Chin lifted, plumes arranged, one eye on the lens. Those long shaggy neck and back feathers are genuine breeding finery, grown for the season purely to be looked at, so the vanity is factual. He even travels with product: herons carry patches of powder down, special feathers that crumble into a fine dust they work through their plumage to lift fish slime and oil. Dry shampoo, built in, always on hand. Vogue would kill for that.
Sushi perfectedHeld in the very tips, with the precision of someone who has done this before. And of all the birds to make the chopsticks joke about, this is the right one — the green heron is one of the only birds on earth known to use tools. They will drop a feather, an insect, a bit of bread, even a mayfly onto the surface of the water, wait for a curious fish to rise to the bait, and take it. Deliberate lure fishing, invented independently of us, practiced in ponds all over Portland. He doesn’t need chopsticks. He brought his own tackle box.
Two spears are better than oneAnd that is closer to the truth than “spear” usually is. People assume a heron harpoons its fish; mostly it doesn’t. The bill works as a pair of tongs — two mandibles snapping shut on the catch, exactly as pictured. The real magic is upstream of that. Light bends when it enters water, so a fish is never quite where it appears to be, and a bird that aimed at what it saw would miss every time. Herons and egrets correct for the refraction automatically and strike where the fish actually is. They solved a physics problem I had to look up.
“Always look on the bright side of life.”The alternate take, and this fish has clearly seen Life of Brian. Say what you like about his situation — the whistling is admirable. There is even a technical excuse for the optimism: egrets hunt the shallow, sunlit edges on purpose, because clear bright water is where they can actually see. So the bright side is genuinely where this happened. It is also, unfortunately, where the egret was waiting.
Fly like an eagle, to the seaNeskowin, where I have spent a good part of my life with a camera, and that is Proposal Rock standing in the surf behind him. He came down the beach low and fast, right along the break, and the only soundtrack my brain would supply was Steve Miller. Time keeps on slippin’ — but the eagle keeps on flyin’, and after all these years of coming back to this beach I have made a certain peace with both.
Two night owls, one alarm clockThat is a barred owl on the left, and the dark eyes are the tell — among owls, dark eyes generally mean strictly nocturnal, so his shift starts right about when everybody else’s ends. Mine has run on much the same clock for most of my life, because jazz musicians keep owl hours by trade: the gig ends at one, the adrenaline runs until three, and nobody in the history of the music has played their best chorus at eight in the morning. Two specialists in the same field, then. And two identical expressions, because somebody has just said the words six AM. Although — the same photograph works just as well as six AM having already happened, with enough coffee in it. Dread and caffeine produce a remarkably similar face. You cannot tell which one this is from the outside, and some mornings I cannot tell from the inside either.
You forgot the berry!This is a real courtship ritual and he has really blown it. Cedar waxwings court by passing a single berry back and forth — he offers, she takes it, she offers it back, and they hop closer along the branch with every exchange until the deal is done. Showing up empty-beaked while perched in an entire buffet of berries is, frankly, indefensible. Look at the posture on him. He knows.
Tiny houses, be likeTwo baby Anna’s hummingbirds, one nest roughly the size of a walnut, and yes — they both live there. The trick is the building material. A hummingbird binds the whole structure together with spider silk, which makes the nest elastic: it stretches as the chicks grow. A tiny house that expands to fit the family, which is more than most tiny houses manage. The lichen stuck all over the outside is the siding, and it is there so the entire arrangement reads as a bump on a branch.
Lucky Duck!He does look pleased with himself, and the water behind him is doing him no harm either. That grin is an accident of anatomy — a duck’s bill is fixed in a permanent slight upturn at the edges, which is why so many of them appear to be having a better day than you are. The sparkle is real though: that is low sun scattering off wind chop, and it is the same effect that makes a duck impossible to photograph well at noon and easy at five o’clock.
Ducks don’t have to worry about big billsThat is a female northern shoveler, and she carries the largest bill relative to body size of any duck in North America. She is not shovelling with it, despite the name. Run your eye along the edges and you would find roughly a hundred comb-like projections per side, called lamellae — the whole apparatus is a sieve. She swims forward with it half-submerged and strains out crustaceans, seeds and plankton, which is essentially what a whale does, performed by a duck. Flocks of them will even paddle in tight circles together to stir food up toward the surface. So: an enormous bill, and no anxiety whatsoever about bills. There is a lesson in there and I am choosing not to examine it too closely.
Send this to your ValentineThe heart is real. Nobody drew that on. It is two damselflies mating, and the shape is a straight consequence of the anatomy: a male damselfly keeps his working equipment tucked up near his chest rather than at the end of his abdomen, so she has to curl the whole way forward to reach it. The result is a heart. Every single time, for something like three hundred million years. Which makes it the oldest valentine on the planet and also an entirely accidental one — I have written about the mechanics elsewhere, and they are less romantic than the picture suggests. Whether that improves the card or ruins it is between you and your valentine.
…and she accepted the berry.No caption needed on this one. He remembered, she took it, and this is the moment it happened — one red berry held between two beaks, crests up, both of them leaning in. They will pass it back and forth a few more times, hopping closer with each exchange, and then they are a pair for the season: they will build together, feed each other, and raise the brood together. I have spent years around these birds and this is the frame I was waiting for the whole time. Sometimes the animals hand you the punchline. Sometimes they hand you this.
Sharing is caring: a field studyThe same courtship, run as a proper experiment. Our skeptic states the hypothesis, gathers data with a single red berry, revises his framework mid-branch, and arrives at the conclusion two birds usually reach right about the time the berry changes beaks. Findings: caring is berry-sharing. Definitely. Peer review pending, though the two of them seem satisfied.
The Bridge of Death, Oaks Bottom branch officeThree questions, ask them he may. Here is the part that makes this more than a costume: the Bridgekeeper is a barred owl, and a barred owl’s call is genuinely a question — the classic hoot is written down by birders as “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?” Of every bird in Oregon, the interrogator role went to the one species that actually interrogates people. I got name and quest. Then he asked about the swallow, and I have been standing on this log ever since. (African or European? He never says. That is the whole trick.)
Duck Love: Expectation vs RealityThe entire arc of mallard romance in four panels: the soul mate, the pickup line that actually worked, and then — as happens to everybody — kids and a log. That last smile is doing a lot of work, and every married couple I’ve shown this to has called it a documentary.
More coming.
The animals keep providing material.
We Can Learn From Nature
Every so often one of them says something that isn’t a joke at all. When that happens, it goes here.
One that isn’t funny.He’s entitled to the stare. By the early 1960s DDT had thinned their eggshells until fewer than 500 nesting pairs were left in the entire lower 48 — the national bird, nearly gone. We banned the chemical, wrote the law, and left them alone, and they came all the way back; delisted in 2007, and now I can photograph one from my kayak on the Willamette. That’s the part worth remembering. We are perfectly capable of driving something to the edge, and we are perfectly capable of choosing not to. He has seen us do both. The warning only works because the recovery is real.
A matter of perspectiveTwo baby hummingbirds in a nest about the width of a walnut. Look at what they are sitting in: plant down and lichen, bound together with spider silk — and the silk is the engineering. It lets the whole nest stretch as they grow, so a cup built for two eggs quietly becomes a cup for two crowded, half-fledged birds who no longer fit the world they were born into. In a couple of weeks they will weigh about as much as a nickel and fly backwards. For now they are stuck sideways in a stretched-out basket, waiting. Some days that is all any of us are doing, and it turns out to be a survivable position.
And here is the perspective problem in motion. One of them has started wing exercises — the flapping every nestling hummingbird does for days before it ever leaves, building the muscle for a first flight — and the sibling is taking the whole workout directly in the face. There is nowhere to go. The nest is the width of a walnut. He simply sits there and absorbs it, which is its own kind of wisdom.
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Become a Member → Already a member? Log inAll photographs © Jonathan Swanson / JonSwan Productions. Made in Portland, Oregon, by standing very still and waiting.