A Mixture

I walked along the track towards Beauty Point Road today. There were not a lot of birds around apart from the usual Eastern Yellow Robins. I watched a family of Superb Fairy-wrens for a while and there was a flock of Bar-shouldered Doves feeding in the Newmann's yard. I saw a Raptor flushed from the trees near the creek but I did not get a good look to get a positive identification. My best guess is that it was a White-bellied Sea-eagle.

I normally ignore the non-Australian birds, but the Spotted Dove in the picture above allowed me to get close enough to get quite a good capture.

 Carmel and I had some shopping to do at Tuggerah this morning so after completing that we drove to Gorokan for lunch near the channel between Budgewoi and Tuggerah Lakes. There were a lot of Silver Gulls there so I decided to hone my Bird-in-Flight (BIF) skills.

There were a lot of Silver Gulls and children of the families having lunch there were busy chasing them.

For once I did not mind too much because the children kept the birds moving, providing plenty of opportunities to photograph them.

I managed to get most of my photographs in focus but framing was often a bit of a problem. I probably need to use a wider angle setting and crop afterwards a bit more. I used a shutter speed of 1/1000s most of the time.

There were a number of Chestnut Teal in the mix of birds on the lake shore as well. The sun came out, lighting up the metallic green heads of the males. There appeared to be some Grey Teals around as well but I am not good at differentiating them from female Chestnut Teal.

There were quite a number of Eurasian Coots around as well. For once, some of them came out on the bank and we were able to see their large partially webbed feet. I would like to photograph them on a contrasting background so their feet show up much more.

We finally called in at the Ocean St Boardwalk in Budgewoi on the way home. I took the iPad with us to see if we could call out some Emu=wrens. About 100m up the walk we saw some movement in one of the thick bushes beside the walk and before long there were about 4 of them in the branches on the other side of the bush. It was too cluttered to get a photogaph, but we were able to see their wispy tails, identifying them as Emu-wrens. It has confirmed our recent experience with them that they are a very difficult bird to observe and photograph.