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.
