The well travelled Tern
Author: David Jenkins
Natural History Photographic Essayist
Red-capped Plover: In high key
I love high-key. Brings out the best in portraits.
Dust Dancing
Lake Louise
Here is a site from my mate Rob Parker.
Worth checking out.
Several years ago, we did our first cruise from Alaska to Vancouver, followed by a Rocky Mountaineer trip to Jasper, then on to Calgary. On the way we spent a day at Lake Louise – one of the most relaxing places I’ve ever been to.
I’m puzzled by the size of this image on this page. It’s an 1800×1200 image, and I put it into this post in the same way as I’ve done with other images; I don’t (yet) understand why it’s displaying so small on this page.
Willie Wagtail
This is Gate Willie.
It has a territory by the main gate at Paradise Road entrance at Western Treatment Plant.
His (?) job in the world is to give lectures to all those who would dare to open the gate and enter the Paradise Road area.
and a good job he does too.
Site Disclaimer
I’ve really been away from the day to day running of WordPress sites. Just assumed everything stayed the same.
But,
Its come to my attention that WordPress now ‘occasionally‘ (euphemism I suspect for consistently and annoyingly) insert Advertisements into my website when you are viewing it.
So the inference is either:
1. I am making some financial gain from ads on the site.
or
2. I’m a cheapskate and I won’t pay WordPress for the ‘Pro’ account that doesn’t use Ads.
So the facts.
I don’t make any financial gain from this site. Never. Didn’t start it with that intention and don’t intend to start. The site is not about me, or my photography, but rather about the birds and they receive no financial gain from the site at all.
I pay WordPress to host my http://www.birdsaspoetry.com site name. They link it using all sorts of clever computer skills, (probably devised by some 11 year old kid in his bedroom at 3:00am in the morning), and I pay them a small fee per year for that privilege. But, it is apparently not enough to prevent the ads.
As they want about $90. a year for the no ads site, I guess in the end I’ll have to put up the cash, but at the moment, if you are assailed by ads, then just click past them. Sorry.
I am mortified that WordPress has taken this approach. Still, nothing for nothing in this world. Just ask the Curlew Sandpipers trying to migrate through farmlands and housing estates in China where once they could stop over for a food topup in the mangroves. Sad.
Hope you’re not put off by the ads.
Thanks for looking
Wandering with Werribee Wagtails at Western Treatment Plant on a rainy day.
White-winged Black Tern
Welcoming back the Flame Robins
Few Changes in Birds as Poetry blogsville
Astute reader that you are, you’ll note that the corkboard backdrop (sooo yesterday, – Paris Hilton), has disappeared
Also each new blog will get a single header image to establish the theme of the blog.
Also for the time being, the images/story will be generated on my other site and sent here for re-blogging. (Not much else on other site, but I can experiment there to get the best look here.
Expect to see the overall theme change on this page, although I’ve said that before and its never happened.
Oh, and while I’ll continue on Flickr, expect to see the images on this site show more of the story of each event. I can’t make Flickr tell a complete tale.
More to come as I try and redevelop this to express where I’m going photographically in 2015 and beyond.
Probably see many more quotes from Jon Young and Rod MacKiver, and Lao Tze and Winnie the Pooh. Oh, well its that sort of mind.
Enjoy the ride.
Walking at Woodlands
Diamond Firetails at Eynesbury
Someone dropped me a line and asked had I abandoned the Birds As Poetry blog.
No not really.
Forgotten about it. Perhaps
Ignored it. Certainly
Too busy to do much. Probably.
So busy with Flickr. That’s a fact.
Slowed down by the new WordPress interface for inputting blog pages. Yep, that would do it to.
But abandoned, is such a, well, final, word.
So a lot of things I could write on have been let go.
We took a day out to Eynesbury to look for specifically “Speckled Warblers”.
In the end we were getting ready to load up the gear and come home when EE said, we should check over in that scrub just near the golfcourse. And so, we went.
Now this area is actually the pathway for the golfing dudes on their motorised buggies to get from one spot to another. So its a little gravel track, and a beautifully maintained lawn on either side.
And it just so happens that the grass had been mowed that very day, and it freed up all the seed for easy access to your average seed eating bird. And what we found was a large party of hunting Diamond Firetails.
Now as it happened EE had taken the camera with her. Mr Skeptic had left his in the car. Too heavy to carry the 50 metres and besides lunch was looking the better alternative.
Now of course the dilemma run (well in my case walk quickly) back to the car, by which time said Firetails will be gone, or just sit and watch someone else gleefully photograph the birds. No much of an option is it?
So by the time I’d arrived back EE and the birds had become quite friendly, and she was up nice and close. Of course big dude with big lens stomping over the grass was only going to have one effect and that would be “No birds”. So I sat a few minutes and watched. In that time golfing dudes had trundled their little truckies along the gravel, and the birds had retreated to the trees, but in quick succession returned to feed. Ah ha! saith I.
I edged over the lawn to within about 10m of the track. Next golfing trio to pass by of course put the birds up, and I moved up the extra 5 metres from the roadside and waited…
And.
Sure enough, trundling truckie disappearing in the distance, the Firetails descended.
Only problem now what which ones to aim at.
Well, that was infact the second problem. I’d lain (laid?) on the grass thinking I would be less conspicuous, but one of the things golfing grounds maintenance staff do, is to water said grass. So here I am laying in the swamp that is the well watered said grass. Soaking it up.
Still I know about wet. You eventually get dry, so I got back to the job in hand.
Enjoy.
I certainly did.
Everybody needs a Hobby
The long delay between posts here is not due to slackness necessarily, but rather to the quiet woodlands around us at the moment. (Oh, and a bit of slackness of my part!)
So skip ahead to today. The Weather man promised some delightful looking sunshine and no real wind. A clear morning both weather and diary, so we made a quick decision to go for an early morning look-see at the Treatment Plant.
For those that know the area, early morning is both a good and bad thing. As you enter the plant, you drive straight into the rising sun. Nothing to see, and hard on both driver and attitude. And we didn’t see anything, except this big yellow blob hanging in the mist on the horizon. Brilliant.
The point of all this is as we were rounding the road that skirts along the Little River, I noted a streak heading across the reed beds on the far side of the river. Only one thing it could be. An Australian Hobby. Used to be called an Australian Falcon, (a much more descriptive name). I think this is the most beautifully marked of our raptors and its falcon like thin wings with the ripple pattern is a treat to see. In flight the speed is awesome. Easy to mis read as a Peregrine I think.
Sure enough that brown streak zipped up over the reeds and I started to get focus on the bird. Using the new AF 350II Focus deal on the D810, it just ripped into spot on focus and held like a fox terrier. The 300mm AF was chattering away trying to keep up. And for the most part the focus held.
Even against the reed beds, where most of my cameras would have gone. These focus elves seem very professional.
On looking at the images, and the bird was indeed too far away for great detail, it looks like this one has ‘rings’ on each leg. So someone has marked the bird.
It made at least 5 passes through the reeds, and even though I was a long way away it was still pretty impressive to see the bird come out of the reeds, climb, stoop and then barrel through the reed beds time after time. You have to be impressed with the speed.
Rather than go on here, the images sort of speak for themselves. Nice way to spend a morning.
Just like meeting old friends
Wow, over a month. What a lot of stuff happens that keeps you from the things you’d like to be doing.
We had a couple of weeks away back up on the family acres, mostly family things, and I have to admit to not even bothering to take a camera. And its not been much better since we returned. So there hasn’t been much to report.
I do have a backlog of a few earlier trips to slot in here, but thought we’d start with the You Yangs.
Our friend Merrilyn (see her blog here), mailed me that she’d seen a Red-capped Robin on a track in the Big Rock area. That was enough to get the gear loaded in the car.
It’s no secret to the erstwhile longtime reader that Woodlands Historic Park was our ‘second’ home. In fact my association with photographing the birds at Woodlands goes back a number of years predating this blog. As I was able to roam over quite a bit of the area, I spent a goodly amount of that time working out which birds where nesting, and where territories might be found. The local Red-capped Robin population also accepted me, and a number of them came to be on good speaking terms, and would come out to see what I was upto anytime I wandered through.
But, as we’ve moved, all that is pretty much ancient history. We’ve be able to locate a couple of areas locally, but none the rival the freedom of being a few minutes away such as Woodlands offered.
Oh, yes, the You Yangs trip.
We set out to have a look at the Red-capped Robing, and despite much searching were Not successful. He might have been travelling through, or he might have been resting in the bush just behind me. So not sighting yet. We also looked for Eastern Yellow Robins and only found a couple of pair. Not unusual, as they have most probably taken a new batch and are quietly feeding them amongst the thicker scrub in the area.
What we did find was quite a few Scarlet Robin juveniles. These lovely birds are very distinguished by their motley feather set as they moult out juvenile and take on first year feathers.
My long time reader will recall that about this time, several years back one such bird turned up at Woodlands and for a few weeks I thought S(he) was female, but within few weeks the beautiful glossy black revealed a very handsome male. So it was like meeting old friends when we came across several family groups of Scarlets. Some still unidentifiable as males or females, and some quite well advanced into first year dress. What was interesting, in the 4 major locations there were at least 4 or 6 such young. And we think that it was only a sample of the numbers of Scarlets that have been successfully hatched this season.
At Woodlands one of my all time favourite birds and a particular interest to my mate Ray, was a single female White-throated Treecreeper. For a number of years she seemed to be on her own. One season I found a male, and later a juvenile, but she went back to her single ways the following year. So it was quite a surprise to encounter a White-throated female, and see her disappear behind a tree trunk. When I looked, there was a nest in the hollow of a tree, and her one young offspring perched on the side of the opening. Just like meeting an old friend.
At a large tree near the Ranger’s Office, there is usually one or two Tawny Frogmouth, but they’d been absent for quite awhile. But we went to look anyway.
And
They were back, along with at least one young one. Again at Woodlands there are a resident pair near the carpark, so again it was like meeting old friends.
Here are some shots from the day.
Birds as Poetry —— Just because I WANDER doesn't mean I'm LOST 