I enjoyed our trip to Broome immensely, it was great to see a region we’d never seen before at a time of year most people avoid. From a bird photography point of view things didn’t turn out how I’d expected them to. I must say that this is probably my fault as I’d been wanting to go for a while and as a result of reading numerous articles and watching countless videos on birding in Broome my expectations were probably too high.

 

 

We saw plenty of birds including eight new to me species. Photographing them was another thing all together. The first thing that made this difficulty was the heat and the humidity – lenses would fog up and take ages to clear. There was a lot of heat haze which combined with long focal lengths meant quite a lot of photos were unsharp. We didn’t experience these problems in Darwin, but then again we visited there at the end of the dry season. One of the ways to overcome this was by getting close to the subject and don’t shoot them at ground level. This worked very well with small bush birds and I got some nice photos with plenty of detail. The real problems set in when shooting the shorebirds. Firstly the tidal range in the Kimberley is huge –  Town Beach has 10m+ tides and it can be 1 Km or more between the high tide mark and the water. You can of course walk out on the mud, but eventually it gets too soft and you sink into it – I speak from personal experience here. So a lot of the time the birds were a speck on the horizon and the OM System 100-400mm mk ii wasn’t long enough. I did try slapping on the 1.4 x teleconverter, but that magnified the heat haze problem and detail disappeared.

 

 

 

The best locations we visited were Kabbarli Lookout (Entrance Point and Port [Broome]), Minyirr Park and Town Beach. We didn’t go to the Broome Bird Observatory as the dirt road becomes almost impassable during the wet and the hire car companies don’t like you going down it. We’ll leave that one for a dry season visit. So yes I would love to go again.