Sydney Olympic Park - Above And Below The Surface

Back in Sydney and we celebrated by going for a wander in Sydney Olympic Park with the boys - keen binocular slinging long time bloggers Iain and Jarrod. What a lovely way to spend a Sunday, we managed to clock up a good amount of kilometers while spotting wildlife, snapping photos and solving most of the troubles of the world.


Sydney Olympic Park always delivers - maybe not anything breathtakingly exotic - it is still in Sydney after all :-) but a good selection of fish, birds and insects, what more can you hope for? Also, as I argued in the latest Perth post, wildlife in parks is very photogenic, if you are after good wildlife close-up photos you are better off going to a busy park than into the wild.

Good stuff! Excellent company and a great day out, back to the car at the sneaky free car park at Triangular Pond - No Lewin's Rail this time around, but only little G. needed that one, so who cares? ;-)
Those of you who are still wondering what creature I caught in the first photo can see a half-"full body shot" of this underwater Juggernaut patrolling the waters of Sydney Olympic Park - I will suggest using tight tight speedos if you should want to go for a swim :-D

Bicentennial Park - Double The Fun?

Getting the jet lag under control, I managed to drag my carcass out of bed an early Sunday morning and fire up the Magna. Not having little G. here I felt that I should take advantage and visit a particular smelly, but fantastic, bird spot in Bicentennial Park - Triangular Pond.

A few specialties of the pond had returned this year, the Lewin's Rail and Spotless Crake, whom I had acquainted myself with nearly a year ago at the exact same pond. Problem is, however, that you need to time your visit; if it is to dry the birds will have left and if the water level is up high they will not need to leave their papyrus plant hideaway to eat. Well, I was too late and hence had to take the full brunt of smell fuming of the near dry pond.

Well, luckily Bicentennial Park has much more to offer and I happily left the stinking swamp for some fresher waters.

Running around with the camera there is always a challenge, despite having seen nearly all (see below) of the birds that inhabits Bicentennial Park, I do not have pictures of all of them and in particular I miss good pictures for a large part of them. The Black-tailed Godwit below should be sorted now though - I have close up of the no-barred tail as well ;-)

I might have been a bit fast while claiming that I have seen nearly all of the BP birds, the one below has me puzzled and once again I would like suggestions from the readers of the blog. Seeing the barring below the wing had me thinking Cuckoo, but ...?

I think, I have said before that the ponds in Sydney Olympic Park are some of the best places around for (water-)bird in flight photos. Also, because of the constant exposure to (noisy) humans it makes it one of the best places to get really close to birds without them taking off. The male Darter below was obviously very happy with its seat and decided to try to fool me into believing that it was a part of the branch rather than having to fly away.

The photo looses quite a bit of the sharpness by being down sized to 640 * 400, but I can promise you that the original is spot on! If just all birds was that photogenic :-)

... will have to bite this post into a few postings: To be continued.

Sydney Olympic Park - Homebush

It has been very quiet on the blog lately - sorry about that! If it can be any comfort the reason for the posting drought is that I have been enormously busy running around with the camera trying to make something happen in the life of Allan so that there would be something exciting to write about later ... and also I must admit that it took me longer than usual to fill out my tax return this year. I might have to rethink my filing system, it seems the good old "keep everything that look important in a pile"-system has grown increasingly cumbersome after 4 years down under :-)

Sydney Olympic Park is a great spot to kill a few hours after trying to find receipts for old flight tickets - at least it stops you from killing other things, such as filing systems and hard-to-search-email-programs ;-)

Triangular Pond is always worth a visit, we got all excited when the little fellow below started darting in between some grass mounds close to the far side - hence the poor image quality - It looks a little bit like something that has lost its tail - any suggestions are welcome.

Otherwise the usual suspects were out showing their feathers:


Walking through the Brickpit ring walk the presence of an Australasian Grebe on the water below could have ended up in a different and dare I say interesting angle for a bird photo - unfortunately it did not really click :-( It was beginning to go dark, the bird was not straight underneath and ca. 20 meters is probably slightly on the long side for a bird of that size .. better luck next time.

Just to make sure it is not all birds I have included this little guy that was lying on the tarmac trying to suck the last bit of heat out of the sun-warm ground before nightfall.