We had some very co-operative visitors this week in the form of 6 Carnaby’s Cockatoos. They arrived in the garden while I was out with young Bertie our puppy. Normally when I dash back to the house and get a camera the birds disappear before I get back. This little group were very relaxed and hung around for ages letting me get quite close to take their picture. When I went to process the photos I thought the black and white birds would benefit from a monochrome treatment.
… Don’t let it get away
It’s a beautiful day”
By
Paul David Hewson / Adam Clayton / Larry Mullen / Dave Evans, 2000
My first outing birding since getting back from Cairns. What a contrast. Instead of a nighttime temperature of 20℃ rising to 30℃ and humidity of 75% while walking through tropical rainforest the morning started at 0℃, with frost and mist as I walked through the jarrah forest that rings Lake Leschenaultia. As my dear old mum used to say I had more skins on than an onion. Honestly I looked like Bibendum the Michelin Man.
I must say as I parked the car and started walking towards the lake I was a little apprehensive – the conditions were pretty rank and I wasn’t really expecting to find anything much. Sometimes going birding is like an act of faith, you set out early in the morning not knowing whether you’ll find anything. I’ve been out on mornings with much more favourable conditions than this and not seen a sausage. So you can understand my trepidation. It turned out I was worrying needlessly. As I drew closer to the lake I could hear all manner of bird activity. Regular readers may remember that three years ago I spotted a Spotless Crake (Porzana tabuensis) near the boat shed and ever since then I’ve been loitering there every time I visit in the hope of seeing it again to no no avail. I developed a kind of “Crake mania” and started obsessively trying to see one, or its cousin the Spotted Crake (Porzana fluminea). Now I was completely over it. I only paused to quickly take a landscape snap of the conditions and a grab shot of a Purple Swamphen (Porphyrio melanotus) and headed off walking anti clockwise rather than my usual clockwise.
Blimey the mist was thick and wet, a bit like members of the royal family, and I was glad that in a last minute decision I’d grabbed a waterproof as I left the house as the fog drip was making me pretty wet. As I crossed the dam wall I couldn’t see more than about 5m in front of me. I was quite surprised to see a small flock of Splendid Fairy Wrens (Malurus splendens) foraging on the path. Every now and again one would take a break and sit on the post and rail fence that stops people falling into the water. They were such a delightful sight that I stayed and photographed them for about 30 minutes. They were quite happy to let me get close and they only left when an angry Red Wattlebird (Anthochaera carunculata) chased them off. Carrying on walking I came to to a spot where the reed beds start on this side of the lake. The weak watery winter sun was starting to peak through the cloud and the scene looked so lovely that I stopped to take a photo. I was lapping up the bucolic setting and the warm sunlight when out of the corner of my eye I spotted something rummaging about in the shallow water at the base of the reeds. It was a Spotless Crake feeding on the fringes of the reeds. “Damn and blast!” or words to that effect, I’d altered the settings on my camera to take the landscape shot and now I was fumbling with the dials trying to switch it back again. My gloves weren’t helping matters here. The bird just carried on like it didn’t have a care in the world. I quietly got down onto my knees and fired off frames like there was no tomorrow.
…to be beside the seaside!
I do like to be beside the sea!
I do like to stroll along the Prom, Prom, Prom!
Where the brass bands play, “Tiddely-om-pom-pom!”
So just let me be beside the seaside!
I’ll be beside myself with glee
And there’s lots of girls beside,
I should like to be beside,
Beside the seaside,
Beside the sea!”
by
John H. Glover-Kind 1907
Cairns Esplanade is a sight to behold early in the morning. It seemed like the whole of Cairns is there clad in lycra leggings, shorts, and vests exercising in every conceivable form. I immediately felt slovenly, ill disciplined, and over dressed. It definitely felt as if this was an odd place to be looking for birds and I did feel surprisingly self conscious. But, having said that, the seafront at Cairns is not some luxurious tropical palm fringed sandy beach, but a mudflat with mangroves at the northern end and that means birds. Lots of birds. So many birds that Sue Taylor in her book “The 100 Best Birdwatching Sites In Australia” rates it as her number three destination. So that is what drew us to the Esplanade.
As I settled in to get some photos a woman sidled up to me and said “You’re not from here are you? I know all the birders here and you’re not local. Where are you from?”. I politely told her I was from Western Australia and was over on a birding holiday thinking I could gain some valuable local information. “Oh I went to Western Australia once. There was nothing there.” At this point I could sense that the conversation was already starting to take a strange turn. She carried on. “You’re wasting your time coming here. They’ve all gone. There’s nothing left. Nothing to see.” I’d just seen 4 species I’d never seen before and told her so. “There’s no point,” she replied, “the light is too bad it makes it pointless to take photos.” . At this point I quietly and quickly moved in the general direction of away.
In hindsight Moaning Minnie was sort of right about the light. The rising sun meant that the birds were strongly backlit, but I never subscribed to the old school photographic technique of having the sun at your back. I’ve always liked contre-jour lighting and as long as you know how to meter and avoid lens flare there’s nothing to worry about. What was bothering me more was that I couldn’t get at eye level with the birds as the Esplanade was about 1m above the mud. The obvious answer to this was to get out onto the mud and lie down, but this is Australia and the mudflats were perfect for saltwater crocodiles and there were signs warning about their presence everywhere. Not wanting to be breakfast for a large ravenous reptile I decided to stay on the Esplanade.
While walking back to the car I was amazed by the Nankeen Night Herons. We have them here in York so they are not new to me, and are actually one of my favourite birds. What was so surprising was how chilled they were around people. Here in York a mere glimpse of a person will put them to flight. On the Cairns Esplanade they were walking along the walkway amongst the people. We sat down to have morning tea by a BBQ and one came up looking for food. It was so close that to photograph it I had to use my compact camera as my other camera’s lens was too long.
All up a good haul for the morning and a great start to the trip.
We recently went to Cairns in Queensland on a birding trip – more about that later – part of the deal on the flight was that we were limited to carry on luggage only. We’d been able to increase my allowance from 7Kg to 14Kg. At first glance this looks easily doable, but the devil is in the details. The main bag could weigh a maximum of 10Kg and measure 56 x 36 x 23cm. The second bag had to be able to fit under the seat in front of you. This pretty well meant that my camera equipment had to be 4Kg in a small bag. I can tell you this caused weeks of furious activity in terms of weighing equipment, doing test packs, looking online at small bags, studying various videos for how wildlife photographers pack for flights, and an inordinate amount of worry.
For our last two trips where we flew (Darwin and Broome) we had the luxury of checked baggage which meant my photographic kit could weigh 7 Kg and fit in a photo backpack that went as carry on. For the last few trips I’d settled on the following equipment:
| Olympus EM1x | 1003g |
| Olympus EM1 mk ii | 620g |
| Olympus 12-40mm f2.8 | 428g |
| OM System 100-400mm f5-6.3 | 1462g |
| 6 batteries | 420g |
| 12 SD cards | 140g |
| Manfrotto 209 table top tripod | 500g |
| Camera Bag | 1780g |
| Monopod | 900g |
This all came to 7.25kg. Clearly something would have to go. The other headache was that my bag wasn’t small enough to fit under a seat. I did countless test packs and made countless changes. Two days before our flight I was still plagued with doubt and indecision. In the end at literally the twelfth hour I made a radical decision and then spent the whole 5 hour flight worrying about whether I’d done the right thing.
So what did I leave behind? All of the above except batteries and SD cards. I took instead a totally untested combination. A brave decision or totally bonkers? Well in the end it was the right decision. So what did I take?
| Panasonic Lumix G9 mk ii | 714g |
| Panasonic Leica 100-400mm f4-6.3 | 1130g |
| Leica D-Lux Type 109 compact camera | 475g |
| 24 SD cards | 280g |
| Batteries | 350g |
| Think Tank Digital Holster 50 v2.0 | 370g |
| Think Tank Speed Changer v2.0 | 300g |
| Think Tank Thin Skin Belt v2.0 | 230g |
| Think Tank RU Hot? Water bottle holder | 120g |
Total combined weight 3.83Kg so a 3.42Kg weight saving. So in practical terms I reduced the load by nearly half and importantly it would fit under the seat in front of me.
Before we talk about the camera and lens choice let’s address the carrying system – it is a a modular belt system which means it is easy to configure for the job in hand. I’ve been using these since the late 1980’s after a trip to the island of Santorini in the Mediterranean. The bag I used for that was heavy without any load, configured badly and the designers had obviously never heard of the concept of ergonomics. At one point on a walk across the island I could have quite happily thrown the the bag and its contents off of a cliff and into the sea. I quickly bought a belt and series of pouches that were made by the now sadly defunct Camera Care Systems. After twenty or so years I started using the Lowe Pro Street and Field System which was originally designed for working professional photojournalists. After a while Lowe Pro made changes to the system and it was no longer as extensive or flexible and I moved over to the Think Tank System. It’s basically a series of pouches and camera holsters that can be used singularly or in various combinations using a waist belt and/or straps. These are great when working events as all the weight is carried on your hips, they are easy to work out of and means you can walk through crowds without knocking anyone flying with a big photo backpack. The major down side is that unlike a backpack there is nowhere to stuff a jacket or anything else.
So how did it go? The short answer is very well. Not having a backpack while I walked through the rainforest in high humidity was heaven. The only downside was that it often caused my trousers to migrate south towards my ankles, so I was walking around hitching them up all the time.
The Panasonic G9 mk2 and the 100-400mm lens worked flawlessly even in quite dim conditions. The new 25Mp dual gain sensor produces lovely files that are a pleasure to work with and the high ISO performance is much better than my Olympus EM1x. There were a couple of aspects that initially caused concern. The first was that the G9 mk ii RAW files are really large – about twice the size of those from the 20Mp EM1x which meant that I’d have to take a lot more SD cards. Normally I take 12 64Gb V60 SD cards and that is all I have of them. I didn’t want to go out and buy a load more as the current price of memory cards is very high. I had a load of 64Gb cards in the slower V30 rating which would mean that the camera buffer would take longer to clear. I took the slower cards but didn’t end up using them. The second was that my EM1x has a built in GPS and tags the files with the location while the G9 mk2 doesn’t. So I had to manually annotate the EXIF with the GPS co-ordinates when I got home. It was only a minor inconvenience.
The Leica D-Lux Type 109 camera was a little gem. The fast standard zoom did everything I wanted. I really should use this camera more.
The trip went really well, probably one of the best we’ve ever done. I’ll post some stuff about it a bit later.
The world has become a very grim place at the moment now that the Mango Menace has unleashed “Operation Epic Fury” (really who comes up with these ridiculous names?) which means we have to take out a mortgage to buy a tank of petrol if we can find a servo with any in stock. So we decided to launch “Operation Numbat” whose sole function was to produce joy.
The goal was to spend a couple of nights at Dryandra and find a numbat. Easier said than done as we have been looking for around thirty years and never seen one. A numbat for the uninformed is smallish, about 30-40 cm long, marsupial that eats termites. It was once quite common across southern Australia, but was driven to the point of extinction when somebody thought that introducing foxes to Australia would be a good idea. There now exist only a few small isolated populations in Australia and Dryandra is one of them. The Western Australian state government introduced Operation Western Shield (another silly name) to protect vulnerable native fauna from feral foxes and cats. In Dryandra this is done with a combination of 1080 baiting and trapping. It’s reckoned that the programme has reduced the fox population by 80% (Marlow et al., 2015).
We weren’t there just for the numbats, we there for Woylies, Echidnas, birds and everything and anything wildlife related.
We arrived at Dryandra at at lunch time and once we’d eaten we set off to walk the Wandoo Walk (day walk) the start of which is located at the Old Mill Dam. The walk is 2.7 Km long and takes about 1 1/2 hours – more if you are looking for animals like we were. It is touted as being good for wildlife with a chance of seeing Numbats. Now the great thing about Numbats is that unlike other small marsupials they are diurnal, and to cap it off like sunning themselves in open areas which in theory should make them easier to see. I say in theory as we have been looking for over thirty years without any luck and I was hoping that this trip would be fruitful. It was a really enjoyable walk and we saw loads of birds – in fact I’d never seen so many Rufous Treecreepers in one day. But, when it came to Numbats we saw neither hide nor hair.
Just before sunset we decided to walk around the large open paddock adjacent to the Dryandra Lions Village where we were staying. Western Grey Kangaroos were grazing on the grass and then we saw something we’d never seen before. We’d spotted an Echidna wandering round looking for ants when it encountered another Echidna. Now Echidnas are incredibly solitary animals and are rarely seen in the company of others. The two animals sniffed each other carefully and then went on their separate ways continuing their search for ants. As I continued walking along the perimeter of the paddock I found another Echidna and it came quite close allowing me to get some nice close ups.
The morning saw us out on the Kawana Walk which is a 3.3Km walk through the Brown Mallet plantation, through the kwongan heath and then back through the Mallet trees. The varied landscape gives great opportunity to spot different birds, Kangaroos, Echidnas and fingers crossed Numbats. Again, like yesterday’s walk, we saw loads of wildlife – birds, kangaroos, and skinks – but no Numbats. It was hard not to feel a little dispirited at this stage. You plan trips and hope to see certain animals, like we did in our recent trip to Broome, but when you don’t find them you can feel very deflated even though you saw other animals.
After grabbing a quick drink I set off to walk down to the Old Mill Dam and sit in the hide there. Apart from seeing a Southern Slider Skink and a dragonfly I saw nothing. Desperation was really starting to set in now, so at 4pm we decided to go on a very slow drive around the park in the hoping that we’d see something. Driving along a deeply corrugated gravel road at 20Kph is enough to shake your fillings out of your teeth. It was torturous. At this stage your mind starts to play tricks on you. You so want to see that animal and you are desperately willing it to happen and every time a branch moves or a bird flies just above the ground you think NUMBAT! Your head twitches backwards and forwards trying to get a better glimpse of what wasn’t there. Suddenly at a junction just standing there as cool as you like was a Numbat just 20 metres away from the car. Gently stopping the car and winding the front passenger window down I managed to rattle off a few frames before it started moving. As it walked further round I could no longer shoot through the open window and I was having to use the front passenger quarter light window. At the time I knew this would seriously degrade the image quality, but I continued anyway in the hope that I might be able to salvage the images in post later. Then within 5 or 10 seconds it was off into the bush and we lost sight of it. We were both exhilarated – we had huge grins on our faces. We’d seen a Numbat! We had really seen a Numbat. Operation Numbat had been a huge success.
It’s now a week since that sighting and the memory of it still brings a huge smile to my face and a feeling of excitement. One Numbat isn’t enough – I want to back and see and photograph more. Hopefully it won’t take another 30 years to do it.
Or perhaps not.
The other day the Beloved Significant Other (BSO) came home from the local cemetery saying she’d seen lots of crows there with some even sitting on the grave stones. She suggested we go the next morning and try and get some suitably gothic photos.
Australian crows (Corvus coronoides) are not in fact crows, but are in fact ravens. They are highly intelligent birds using tools to help feed themselves, they’ve also been observed softening dried out hard food in water to make it soft enough to eat. As I said, very clever. For the local Nyoongar people the raven is called Waardong – the watcher – and is seen as crafty, cunning and very unpredictable. That is where our plan failed. There was no way we going to get close enough to get a photo. I approached using cover and while just trying to peek around the corner of a wall they’d immediately see me and all take off. I didn’t manage to get one single photo of a raven.
There were other birds at the cemetery and I thought that one of them – Wardawort or the Grey Butcherbird (Cracticus torquatus) – would make a suitable replacement for a raven. The Grey butcherbirds were far more approachable than the ravens and it was possible to get quite close which was great for taking photos. The problem was that they didn’t want to sit on top of the grave stones but rather they perched on the wrought iron work that surrounded some of the graves. I still took some pictures but they didn’t match what I’d envisioned – reality seldom does. Getting home I tried processing the the photos as black and white trying to give a suitably dark menacing tone. It just didn’t work. The Grey Butcherbirds didn’t have that spooky/menacing appearance that the ravens have. I also thought that the colour photos looked better, but they did not convey that gothic vibe I was trying to create.
It was a fun exercise. We did talk about how we might get the ravens to hang around. The most logical way would be to put down food for them on a regular basis and so change their behaviour. The ethics of that are a bit suss – get animals habituated to humans and dependent on hand outs just for a photo. Bit dodgy that one. We feed and water birds in our garden, but this is different. It is not our garden and the ravens are naturally wary of people. The birds in our garden are already habituated to us. We didn’t have to put out any food to encourage that. The only other way is to just keep going back over and over again. Who knows we may chance upon a raven that isn’t too fussed about people who is sitting on top of a grave stone and using it as an anvil so they open up snail shells. Preferably on a misty morning. I rather think that pigs might fly first.
“I’m waiting
Waiting for the tide to turn
Patience, patience, patience
Is one sure thing that I’ve learned”
By
Robert Cray, Mike Vannice and Dennis Walker
My last birding outing in Broome was to Town Beach – a whopping 5 minutes walk from where we were staying. It was the evening before we were due to leave Broome and I wanted to get some photos of the migratory shorebirds that are found in Broome at this time of year.
The tide was out and a long way to boot. Ideally I’d want the tide to be coming in as it would push all the birds closer to me. A receding tide would take them away from me. So the question was how to get close to the birds while avoiding the liquid mud that was between us. The obvious answer was the jetty as it extends 112m out from the shoreline. The only problem was that it is very high to account for Broome’s 10m+ tides. Then I noticed some kids playing on what appeared to be a lower level and watching them carefully I saw how they were accessing this level and I quickly took up position. Most of the birds were still a long way out – well over 500m. After watching for a while I saw that there were a few different species of bird that were closer to me, but even so I’d need to fit my 1.4 x teleconverter to my 100-400mm lens. Not ideal because of the hit on image quality and having a maximum aperture of f9 forcing the use of high ISOs and lower shutter speeds.
There were quite a few different species out on the mud. There was an Eastern Reef Egret and a Little Heron poking around amongst some rocks for something to eat. A Whimbrel stayed for ages going back and forth. Every now and again a little flock of assorted birds – Rudy Turnstones, Terek Sandpipers, Greater Sand-plovers and Grey-tailed Tattlers – would land and have a bit of a feed then something would spook them and they’d all take off again. It was brilliant and time just flew past. All too soon the sun was starting to dip below the horizon and the light levels were too low to continue photographing. All in all it was an excellent end to an excellent trip.
The title for this blog entry comes from the song by the great Robert Cray.
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.
Mangroves are a very new experience for me. My first real experience of them was in 2024 when we went to Darwin in the Northern Territory. So I was looking forward to having a look at the mangroves in Broome.
Mangroves are basically shrubs or trees that have adapted to living in the upper tidal zone in saline or brackish water. Their root systems have developed so they can resist tidal forces and cope with saltwater immersion. They stabilise coastal areas preventing coastal erosion and protect from tsunamis. At the same time they provide an important ecosystem that support an incredible diversity of species. In Broome the mangrove systems occur east and south of Roebuck Bay. The tidal range is huge which means a vast expanse of mud can be exposed at low tide. Now there were two things that put me off exploring when the tide was out. The first was that the mud is soft. I’d seen Reef Egrets and Striated Herons sink quite deep into it. The other was salt water crocodiles. They live in the tidal rivers, creeks, and mangroves around Broome. At Streeter’s Jetty there was a sign warning of the dangers of crocodiles and the Jetty does get closed if there is a sighting. So as you can see my exploration was a bit limited, but it was enjoyable and it was nice to see and photograph something a bit different.
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