Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Kingfisher Park - Morning Birding


It is enormously stressful being on holiday, but so very rewarding! :-D Getting up early next morning realizing that we would have to leave Kingfisher Park before lunchtime, we made sure to take 100% advantage of the time we had.

Sitting on the porch scoffing my breakfast while ticking an Emerald Dove passing by, was a fantastic start to the day - guess it was anticipating that some of all that muesli would not hit the spot at the excessive speed I was eating at. Little G. managed to outscore me with about 100%, also having to pull out the pen for a very curious Blue-faced Honeyeater.

After breakfast, we got the boots on and started our last round of the property. Bird-wise the equivalent of letting two kids run wild in a candy store! :-) Absolutely fantastic stuff, new birds everywhere - you nearly got dizzy spinning around trying to follow that unknown bird flying pass or looking after what bush that weird call came from. Spectacled Monarch above and Pale-yellow Robin (race nana) below.


Both little Shrike-thrush and Bower's Shrike-thrush were running around and Yellow Honeyeater decided to show. While all of this were going on I realized that I was in trouble - all the flash shooting the night before and what I had done in the Daintree rain forest had eaten away 60% of my battery life, there was still 3 days left .. and I had left my charger home in Sydney! I simply had to reduce the use of the flash, which was a bit of a disaster! Flash is the best (and only?) way to get good pictures in dark places.


Great guns! We clocked up nearly 3 hours of hardcore birding, including nearly 45 min of intensive stalking of a Noisy Pitta - which we heard multiple times, but never saw!

Got the little Toyota packed, made a final visit to the feeder and we were on the road again. This particular morning we indeed felt blessed not only had we had a fantastic birding morning, but also the weather seemed to smile at us .. for a couple of hours until it started raining again with a vengeance! :-D

2 comments:

Mark Young said...

Sounds like you're having a hard time up there! ;)
Nice set of images. The BFHE pose looks cool.

AGL said...

Hi Mark,

Yeah really hard - but someone has to do it ;-) .. We were there beginning of April - I have just been too busy keeping the blog properly up to date, but a few rainy Sydney weekends and I should be able to catch up.

Cheers Allan