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Aussie birds


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Posted

Australian Kingfishers. I got to see and photograph 4 species of kingfisher on my recent visit to my son in Queensland. In order of size:

 

Little Kingfisher:

 

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Posted

Azure Kingfisher:

 

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Posted

Sacred Kingfisher:

 

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Posted

Kookaburra - the world's largest kingfisher:

 

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Posted

I didn’t know the Kookaburra was a kingfisher!

Lovely photos 

Posted
14 hours ago, TonyQ said:

I didn’t know the Kookaburra was a kingfisher!

Lovely photos 

I'm not sure I did until I read up about them when I visited last month. Having said that now I know their appearance does support this. This is a quote from the Wikipedia entry:

 

'Kookaburras are terrestrial tree kingfishers of the genus Dacelo native to Australia and New Guinea, which grow to between 28 and 47 cm (11 and 19 in) in length and weigh around 300 g (11 oz). The name is a loanword from Wiradjuri guuguubarra, onomatopoeic of its call.' 

Posted
On 7/5/2022 at 3:47 AM, TonyQ said:

I didn’t know the Kookaburra was a kingfisher!

Lovely photos 

me neither!

  • 3 months later...
Posted (edited)

  I thought I should contribute to this forum, as it was my early trips to Africa which revealed my very ordinary photographic talents and motivated me to improve by practising on Australian nature. Birds in particular are very common and easy to find, but not at all easy to photograph, so they're a grand subject to practise on. 

  I've seen a lot of fine bird photos in this forum, including one of Australia's smallest, the Spotted pardalote, which grows to about 10 cm.  So I've chosen one of my favourite "pardy" images. In fact, it's a composite of two photographs, taken at the same location in South Australia's Innes National Park several years ago:  a closeup of the bird with a nice clean BG, and a long lens landscape of a nearby thick woodland of Eucalypts, the bird's ideal habitat.29331437_InnesPardalote.jpg.40b200da7b367d04c79ecd783a3b5623.jpg 

 While the Spotted pardalote feeds in the canopy, it actually nests in tunnels in earth banks. When I first encountered the species years earlier, the male and female allowed me to get quite close with my camera. I was ignorant of their nesting habit, and that I might have been standing on or near the entrance to their nest. You learn more than how to improve your photography. 

 

 

Edited by John M.
Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, John M. said:

 Here's my photo of the delightful little female, watching me as I potentially trampled on her nest in that earlier episode.

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Edited by John M.
Change image
Posted

  While I didn't know where their nest was, I was aware that they were nesting because the male was carrying the makings.  I've always wondered if I did any damage; but it was a learning experience I'm forever grateful for.

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Posted

These next three images are the result of unplanned, spur-of-the-moment point-and-shoots, with no time to check camera settings. Nevertheless, I sold the galahs and the corellas, so there's always hope.

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I'd never seen so many Black swans together. Taken at St Kilda beach on Adelaide's northern fringe a few years ago. 

 

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Galahs in the Flinders Ranges. We stopped the car when we saw the flock feeding on a hillside. They took flight as I approached.  Film camera about 20 years ago.

 

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Little corellas over the Darling River at Menindee, New South Wales, also with film camera in the early 2000s. I was totally unprepared for the sight, yet somebody liked it as "arty" wall decoration. 

 

 

  • 1 month later...
Posted

I enjoyed capturing pairs, and was fortunate to collect quite a few images over the years. Here are the first...a pair of purple-crowned lorikeets which were attracted to the birdbath in my garden on a hot summer day about 20 years ago.

 

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Posted

And purple-gaped honeyeaters, photographed from a blind in Innes National Park a few years ago.

 

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Posted

Tawny frogmouth, a pair with their young.  It's a marvellous nocturnal hunter of insects and other small prey like mice, and its plumage as it sits motionless on a branch is almost perfect camouflage in daylight.  The closeup portrait is of another of the species which I found sitting on a fence, probably habituated to human contact.

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Posted
57 minutes ago, John M. said:

Tawny frogmouth, a pair with their young.  It's a marvellous nocturnal hunter of insects and other small prey like mice, and its plumage as it sits motionless on a branch is almost perfect camouflage in daylight.  The closeup portrait is of another of the species which I found sitting on a fence, probably habituated to human contact.

 

 

 

 

@John M.

we saw them at Herdsman Lake in Perth in 2019 and I hadn't realised how small they were. But it was just awesome that we managed to find them as they, just as you had said, blended in so well into the tree trunk. 

 

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Posted

Some birds make photography easy. These Laughing Kookaburras came by, looking for a free feed, while we were having a BBQ in a picnic spot. Habituated kookaburras are notorious for stealing food. My wife once had a hot sausage roll stolen by a flying kooka as she was putting it in her mouth.

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Musk lorikeets at my birdbath.

 

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Posted

One of the Muskies after a cool dip.

 

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It can get busy on hot days. 

 

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Posted

Beautiful!

  • 2 weeks later...
Posted

Here's a pair I'd never imagined I would encounter. On a brief visit to a remotish private rural property in north-eastern Victoria, I had five minutes with satin bowerbirds, the blue-black male collecting blue objects to attract his mate to his bower, an archway of twigs and grass on a thick layer of twigs. 

 

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Posted

Besutiful!

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