Author: David Jenkins

Today, dear Reader, it’s all about…. You!

Well at least that is what the assignment says.   And as this is not for profit, not political, not competitive, and essentially about the birds, the process of audience profile, identification, and finding the niche in the market, leaves me just a bit blah, and pretty much over Blogging 101.

Still its always nice to be prompted to look at things from another perspective. Keeps us fresh.

I practice Tai Chi, (there a new factoid), and one of the reasons is an awareness of the constantly changing orientation of the body, its parts relative to each other and to the surroundings. And funnily enough when I get to the bush, the same kinds of awareness helps to appreciate the birds and their surrounds. (maybe I’m just getting old and mellow?)

Parenting in the You Yangs

We, EE and I, have been working for several months now, with a delightful pair of Eastern Yellow Robins as they accept the challenge of adding their little bit to the gene pool.

As EE has adopted this pair, I’ve been a bit reluctant to pursue them as well.  Figuring that parenting a young Eastern Yellow Robin is difficult enough.  For the un-initiated, she sits on the eggs for around two weeks, then they feed the young, (usually two, but this pair had one) for about two weeks.

Then it jumps from the nest, flutters to the ground and spend the next 3-4 weeks hiding in the leaflitter.  Barely able to fly as it has no real flight feathers at this stage, it must surely be among some of the most vulnerable of birds. But, the process works.

So, finding this well disguised and cleverly marked tiny bird is typical needle in haystack stuff.  See point above about awareness and you’ll begin to grasp what goes on at the location.  Not that we are chasing the bird. Far from it. Sometimes I really just want to know where it is, so we don’t inadvertently stand on it. Or more probably flush it to a new location. Bad for it, stressful for the parents, and against my work ethic. See border box.

We have pretty much been unable to distinguish the female from the male, so really not much point, as Jack Sparrow (should be a Cap’n in there somewhere) says, Naming fingers and pointing names.

Now as the young bird is much more mobile, it has become somewhat easier to sit, wait and opportunistically,  it will fly by and sit.  And it did.

I knew where it was pretty much from the moment we got off the track and into the scrub.  See point on Awareness above. How?  Well let’s just say Mum told me.

After bringing it down for us to admire, and then feeding it a great big grub, she decided that was sufficient activity for the moment and a big sleep would do wonders for the little bird.

After much body language, and a really interesting ‘fluffed up’ head, the little dude took off the the undergrowth for a sleep.  And this is where I reckon it gets really interesting.
Not just anywhere out of sight and hidden, but in the bush next to where I’d been sitting.

The distance measured by the camera through the bushes to the little dude is less than 4 metres.  It snuggled up on a branch with Dad (?) nearby and Mum (?) on guard on a tree directly above.

Point is, I’m still having the hair on the back of my neck stand up about it. The choice was hers  to sit in that close to me.  I didn’t move. Jon Young calls it a Rite of Passage, in a world in which “Connection” has to do with the strength of your mobile fone signals;  sitting still for the sacred and connected moments brings dramatic benefits. A full-contact nature sport!

Enjoy

I’ve joined a WordPress Challenge to revisit my blog and take some time to make some new discoveries to the things that I write and put up online.   So expect to see a few Blogging 101 post over the next few weeks.

Well it wouldn’t be a Birds as Poetry blog if we didn’t feature some birds, so here are few from a recent You Yangs morning.  Then we’ll get down to blogging assignment.

I’ve added a black border to the images that matches the look and feel of the blog.  I like that sort of co-ordinated feel.

Which Brings us to Blogging 101

One of the challenges is to revisit the reason for the blog in the first place.  Bird as Poetry is not the first blog I had been working on.  I used to use a wonderful Mac program called iWeb.   And it was auto published to another piece of Apple Goodness called MobileMe.  But of course Apple moved on and the blog had to have a new home.
Enter Telstra.  Bigpond in particular.  And they housed my ramblings which at the time included lots of updates of Classic car photos we were making, (and selling!).  But,  Telstra too decided that charging big bucks for their service didn’t include a website and so Birds As Poetry was lonely again.

With all that background I was over a xmas break looking for nothing in particular in a newsagents and found a “How to make a WordPress Blog” mag, and with little else on over the holiday, snapped it up, proceeded to the computer and began.  Which is why the earliest in this blog is about 2012.  The rest just wafted off into the ether. Or where ever else stuff goes when you hit the DELETE button.

Finding a “voice” that suited my writing style and the blog I suppose was always a big part of the challenge.   Making it tongue in check and introducing some elements from everday life became a part of my process. Think Pie Shops, Coffee Places.  interesting characters and places we’ve visited: Think “A Bridge that needed a Jolly Good Walking to”

Around the same time I began collecting a collection of collectable photos of walks around Woodlands Historic Park.  Not far from home, and filled with really interesting birds, and as my knowledge of bird photography grew, so did my collection of robins and the like.

I was also teaching a class on visual elements in photography and the concept of visual poetry.  A hop step and a really big jump through Haiku poetry lead to Birds as Poetry as a title  So it stuck.

I suppose I could have taken  a step to extend ‘how to’ articles but let’s face it, google will find you plenty. A scant few of them might in fact be useful, and correct, the rest?  Well, mostly just un initiated rambles by people who haven’t done the hard yards behind a camera.

Who dear reader are you?  Mostly I think folk that have either found the blog, or have been directed here by either word of mouth or from my Flickr site.  Flickr!  Gotta talk about that sometime too.

I really wish there was a much better co-ordination between Flickr and WordPress. But not so.

How to measure the success of the site. Well here’s the scoop. Its not a competition.  In another part of my life I Tai Chi.  A very personal activity that has little that can be measured or passed on to others.  So blogging, So  birding.
A thought that reverberates with me is “Birding is not a Spectator Sport!”.

I once started a blog that was going to try and see birding as a spectator sport with commentators and scores and all sorts of things. But. I may yet.

I do enjoy the comments that occasionally come my way, and thanks to all those who’ve taken the time to drop me  a note about some of the photos.  Makes the keyboard experience a little more involving.

So there we are.  Well done for persevering to the end of page 1.