Driving through rapeseed : A car seems to drive in the middle of a rapeseed field near Bautzen, in the eastern German state of Saxony. (AFP/DDP/Norbert Millauer)

Birds flying at sunset. Starting as a single excited shout, the words rippled down the line: "Hoopoe! Hoopoe! Left! Left! Left!" To the uninitiated ear it sounded like the chant of an excited crowd of football fans. But these gasps of delight came from a jovial group of a dozen binocular-wielding Britons doing what they love best -- birdwatching in Europe's avian megalopolis. (AFP/Attila Kisbenedek)

Past the poppies : Cyclists pedal by a poppy field during the 12th stage of the 91st Giro d'Italia from Forli to Carpi. Italy's Daniele Bennati won the stage while country fellow Giovanni Visconti kept the pink jersey of the overall leader. (AFP/Filippo Monteforte)

Alps view : View of Tignes, French Alps, where the French football team is practicing for the upcoming Euro 2008. (AFP/Franck Fife)

A newly born baby flamingo reaches up for its mother at the Oji zoo in Kobe, western Japan May 25, 2008. REUTERS/Yuriko Nakao (JAPAN)

Lake landing : A bird lands in a rock in the Llanquihue lake, some 50 km east of Puerto Varas, 966 km south of Santiago. (AFP/Francisco Negroni)

A sculptor works at a sand park exhibition in Pera, southern Portugal May 21, 2008. More than 60 sculptors created a park with sand sculptures of well-known Hollywood films and characters in the Portuguese southern village of Pera. The park will be inaugurated on Thursday. REUTERS/Hugo Correia (PORTUGAL)

A giant fork sculpture, created in 1995 by Swiss artists Jean-Pierre Zaugg and Georges Favre, is pictured on the shores of Lake Leman in front of the Alimentarium, the Food Museum, in Vevey June 4, 2008. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse (SWITZERLAND)

A gopher runs alongside the car of McLaren Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton of Britain during the afternoon practice session at the Canadian F1 Grand Prix in Montreal, June 6, 2008.

REUTERS/Christinne Muschi

Photograph by Robb Kendrick

A Qatari man in a traditional white dishdasha robe and a wind-blown red-and-white kaffiyeh stands before a sandstone formation near Dukhan. Qatar, a desert-covered Persian Gulf peninsula about the size of Jamaica, may be small, but its oil and natural gas reserves give it big clout. Per capita incomes there are among the highest in the world.

(Photo shot on assignment for, but not published in, "Revolution From the Top Down: Qatar," March 2003, National Geographic magazine)