Was outside watching the birds this afternoon. It’s been quite cold and today the wind is bitter, so I was rugged up but the sun was out and I needed to just be outside for awhile. Thought I’d try and get some photos of kookaburras in flight – which isn’t easy when you have a really long lens, you’re not too far from the birds, and they do very short flights – from a fence to the ground and backup again. But after several attempts I managed to get a couple of reasonable shots, which you’ll see below.
Was interesting to observe though, that the magpies had found food and one of the kookaburras pounced onto one maggie and stole its food. I missed getting that shot as I didn’t realise what was happening at first. And then two other kookaburras tried to steal from the one kookaburra, two other kookas turned up and the game was on! I went for a walk around part of the paddock and down to the billabong and back up, when I noticed two of the ducks from yesterday were back in the paddock, just grazing in the grass. One of the magpies didn’t like this so swooped the female duck and she, and the male, took off for the billabong and stayed there for awhile. Two of the maggies flew up to the gum trees above, calling and just watching.
During all the time the crimson rosellas just ignored all the activity and kept grazing by the chook pen, as they do, usually with the maggies. I often throw out grain and kitchen scraps to them when I feed the chooks each day. All of the birds have gotten used to my presence, which is great. Love living up here in the hills, you never know what you’re going to see each day, the environment is lovely, clean and fresh and the local community of people are great.