(6 Photos, click to zoom) –
A few of the brighter, faster – and hard to shoot – Tasmanian birds about the garden.
I love these little birds! They hop around fast and flitty, in groups looking for insects and small grubs. This one is the bright blue male, who usually has a harem of three or four plainer brown ladies flitting around him. They are very shy and dart off, disappearing like faeries as soon as they see me. This time, I saw them first 🙂
Next up is the another small and incredibly fast insect hunter, the Welcome Swallow. I spied a quite a large number hunting together when I fed my ponies one morning last week, mostly high in the air with the odd one flying low across the paddock, so grabbed the camera to try my luck. I didn’t have much time and didn’t think I stood a chance, but I got lucky, this one image out of 30 or so was the pick of them. It was a fair way off, this is cropped in at 100% pixels with the 14-150mm (300mm FF equivalent) lens.
Apparently if Welcome Swallows choose your house to nest in it is a sign of good luck. And a sign your in for lots of bird droppings!
Green Rosella’s are also shy, they get into my manferns eating the seeds and destroy them – but I don’t mind, except they always fly off before I can get a shot. This one was in a neighbours tree – again, on my way down to feed the ponies. Not a great shot, but I took the opportunity while it presented itself.
And another shot of my new friend, I can hear him in the morning when I wake up from my bed! He seems to have taken a liking to my car’s side mirror.
Out of interest, I decided to write down all the birds I could recall seeing in the valley where I live, a total of 27 species!
Tawny Frogmouth
Southern Boo Book owl
Sulphur-crested Cockatoo
Yellow-Tailed Black-Cockatoo
Long Billed Corella
Green Rosella
Currawong
Forest Raven
Tasmanian Wedgetail Eagle
White Goshawk
Masked Lapwing Plover
Perfect Blue Fairy Wren
Brush Wattle Bird
Bigger Wattle Bird
Robin Red Breast
Pacific Black Duck
Laughing Kookaburra
Native Dove (Bronzewing?)
Tasmanian Native Hen
Striated Pardalote
Yellow Throated Honeyeater
New Holland Honey Eater
Welcome Swallow
Magpie
Sparrow
Starling
Feral Chicken/Rooster
TasView 
It is autumn migration season here, enjoying out visitors.
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Lots of fresh spring flowers and insects have bought more birds into the valley in the last few weeks here 🙂
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So beautiful and colourful. I see Aus has the Welcome Swallow. In NZ, we met the Welcome Sparrow, when we went to tour the Glow Work caves near Hamilton. Amazing diversity in a species. Thanks for sharing. Allan
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Thanks for commenting, I have to admit, I don’t know where the Welcome Swallows here migrate from. They fly so fast it wouldn’t take them long to get here!
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And all I get is greyish sparrows and killer magpies…so awesome!
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Thanks, I’ve lived here for over 20 years now and it’s only since last year the magpies started visiting!
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Wow! I love these birds, so different from here. Beautiful colors and designs of the feathers! You are blessed with so much bird beauty, my friend!
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Thanks, there’s many more birds here now than years ago! Due in part to planting lots of grevillea hedges and other flowering natives and bottle-brushes. Provides shelter for nesting, flowers for the insects and honey eaters.
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You’re so lucky to live in a place that has so many wonderful birds!
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I know 😀 Thanks for commenting.
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Wonderful photos, most birds in my area are migrating.
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Thank you, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to just fly off to some warmer weather!
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It’s one thing to photograph the subject and quite another to know about it. The fact that you know the species that you have captured really shows the amount of time you put into it. Great work 🙂
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Thank you and glad you noticed, it makes the effort worthwhile 🙂 I enjoy not only learning about photography, but the subjects I take as well, it makes it (and life) more interesting. I also quickly realised this blogging format is much more international and viewers may nor know anything about Tasmania.
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I have to pick on your comment on this platform being “international”. Do you really get that many viewers outside your “followers”? If yes, how? To me the “discovery” in WordPress isn’t nearly the best when compared to other platforms.
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Most of my followers and site visitors here are not from Australia or people I’ve met like on facebook. There are still many visitors who come to my site who have searched for my older 2015 drone information pages which I left on here to help them out – the information is specialised and not collated like this elsewhere 🙂 There’s many links to them as people have shared the pages on other platforms.
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Ah..hah…thank you for the insight! 🙂
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There is something faery-like about these birds –
the way the colour explodes with such star-like intensity on the plumage…
reminders that the world is still a canvas,
and we still have the option to be painters, to be something else…
something new.
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Thanks for visiting, they are so impossibly small and delicate, flitting around so fast that they do seem enchanted.
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Beautiful bird!
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Thank you, the little blue fairy wrens seem too delicate to be real!
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