Sunday, September 21, 2014

Bushwalking in John Forrest National Park, A stroll along Swan River and an outing in Kings Park


Those WA trips always ends up being fairly action packed, with a good variety of things to do. I keep treasuring the chance of having a walk in John Forrest National Park. It is just a genuine, good, honest WA national park wedged in between a highway and ever expanding real estate - no super exotic wildlife or stunning waterfall - just dry lovely scented Australian scrub and the possibility of seeing a little wildlife. Happy about the photo above! The shutter speed was quick enough to get the eye of the Brown Honeyeater good and sharp and making the bird stand still in the air, and slow enough to allow movement of the wings and make it all look alive - Pure luck! :-) I have read quite a few blog and forum posts on how to perfect this type of shooting. For birders it seems particular well developed/described for the purpose of taking in flight stills of Hummingbirds, which due to the higher frequency of their wing beat increase the challenge. Above I wrote "no super exotic wildlife", however, the level of exotic depends, as always, on what you are used to and for a kid as I living in Sydney (at the time) something like a Red-capped parrot will trigger some celebration and a few clicks on the camera. Red-capped Parrot is not a rare bird at all, as long as you are in the south west corner of WA, elsewhere it is super rare! For some reason this bird had eluded me on all my previous visits to WA - at least, I had never been sure enough to actually claim to have seen it - this time around we saw two, male and female, both of the photos above are of the male. Otherwise Perth was delivering all the usual stuff. Black swans on the river, a pod of dolphins playing around in the waters of Matilda Bay and an excellent variety of blooming bottlebrushes, Callistemon, in Kings park. All very common daily happenings for those Perthians.

Tuesday, April 29, 2014

SW WA Inland Forest - Shannon National Park Area


Still a bit behind with the blog, but I have had a few weeks of holiday and a fair bit of photo selection and editing has been going on. So once again, I will dare to say that there should be more (old) news arriving at these pages fairly soon. I will look into the possibility of being much more ruthless and cut closer to the bone when publishing my ramblings, so who knows, I might catch up at some point in the next few years. Inland the south western corner of WA is not too shabby either! Great rain fall and protected from the wind, it feels like you can grow anything there in great volumes. We had some close encounters with a wonderful tightly packed walnut tree full of fresh nuts. Very different in taste from the dried version, which I have consumed during long dark Christmas nights in Denmark - A little search on the internet reveals that it should be fairly simple to grow a walnut tree in Denmark ... slightly harder to make it bear fruit, but probably worth a try(?) Going into winter is not the optimal time for birding the inland forest of SW WA. However, trees are much more reliable than the feathered inhabits and of all places, this probably the best place to see many of the hugely impressive eucalyptus species at their finest, in particular the Karri, Eucalyptus diversicolor, native to the area. A few birds were around though and they seemed fairly relaxed about my presence. I am particular happy with the bird in flight shot of the (White-tailed) Black-Cockatoo and the close up of the Scarlet Robin.