This website is dedicated to creatures of flight that tease all of us with earthbound bodies.
Ever since Icarus, so many of us have dreamt of flight. That fascination has prompted many hours of watching birds and bees and other winged beings fly, just out of reach or soaring high and trying to capture them in photos.
Having had the wonderful opportunity to travel around Australia with work commitments, I’ve had so many trips to far away places where I’ve had the chance to photograph so many of Australia’s flying critters. Trying to keep the camera battery charged and the camera always at the ready….even at the airport when the little red-backed fairy wrens are playing in the grass while we are waiting for our lift to arrive.
Even so there have been many missed opportunities too. How to capture the bird with a fish in beak flying over the bridge I’m driving over to get to work? Hmm, a problem for another day.
Birds
Pigeons
I decided to start this website with the pigeons. Why? They’re ubiquitous and I thought they were boring. I studied Torresian Imperial pigeons on a scientific expedition at the Low Isles in Far North Queensland as a teenager. Endless counts of flocks of birds returning to their nests in the Low Isles in the evening after a days feasting on the mainland to get an idea of their numbers. They’re white with black wing tips and sleek and elegant. Other than this, the other pigeons I’d come across seemed quite uninteresting.
The Torresian Imperial Pigeon
Out at Mt Isa to meet up with a friend – the familiar cry of “stop the car” goes up. And always the question ‘why?’ There’s a bird, ‘of course’. The birdlife out at Mt Isa is definitely worth a visit.
The bird in question is a spinifex pigeon and it’s down on the ground. The initial photo showed a blue membrane across the eye and I think its got some sort of eye problem. The next photo just showed that it had it’s eyes closed! And when I tried to get out of the car to minister assistance it took off being very much ok. Further down the road we find more of them and it turns out that the ground Is where they hang out.
I started to take more of an interest in pigeons.
The crested pigeon, which a lot of people incorrectly identify as the top-knot pigeon has beautiful wing colourings if you can catch it in the right light.
I was beginning to think the top-knot pigeon in the bird books was a figment of the author’s imagination. A friend reassures me that they’ve seen one in real life. Then a trip to Paluma to seek the Golden Bowerbird with a new camera unexpectedly turned up a top-knot pigeon on a branch as well.
We only spent 3 days in Mt Isa on our road trip but got an amazing array of new birds for our collection. The Bronze wing pigeon was another one. We’ve vowed we’ll need to go back as the weather wasn’t great for photos, they’d just had bushfires and the air was hazy.
Another trip to Murwillumbah in NSW this time. Another pigeon I’d never seen before. The Wonga pigeon. Thankfully I have a wonderful friend who is a birdwatcher and can identify the birds that I’m photgraphing.
Cuckoo Dove
Storks and Cranes
The Jabiru
The Sarus Crane and the Brolga
Again, only when you see them next to each other is it obvious that there is a difference between these birds.
The Golden Bowerbird – gets a page all of it’s own
We had heard of the Golden Bowerbirds and were told that they were to be seen in Paluma at the end of November. Then, while of a trip to the tablelands we were walking around the lake at Lake Bariine taking bird photos when a couple came up with a strobe-lighted camera. They advised us to take our photo first as the strobe light would cause the bird to flee. They showed us the shot they obtained which was infinitely superior to ours. The couple then asked whether we’d seen the Golden Bowerbird. We said no. She said “ you go to Mount Hypipamee to the car park and then you walk one hundred metres…’. He interrupts ‘No it was about 250m, the 3rd track along”. She says “you walk up the hill 90 meters and he says “No, remember we had the GPS and it was 200 metres”. We think to ourselves, we are never going to find this bird with such confused instructions and anyways it’s late and we have to get home.
We decided to go back the following weekend. We had experience of the ‘Great Bowerbird’ bowers in Townsville but realised when we got halfway up the hill that we had no idea what the Golden Bowerbird bower looked like and we had no phone signal to check the internet. So we found a thing that looked like it was constructed by something but as it didn’t look like what we were used to and we weren’t 200 metres up the hill. The husband suggests that we keep looking. We find a second similar structure but still no sign of a bird. We gave up.
We then walked out to the road and found we had got enough signal to look up the bower. The bower looked surprisingly like the structure we’d seen. So back up the hill we go. This time we hear this awful noise. It turns out these magnificent birds have an awful metallic grating call. I spotted the bird on a branch. It’s not easy to photograph as it blends in well with the sun-dappled leaves.
Years later, we finally go looking for the Paluma Golden Bowerbird with similarly vague instructions. This is where we find the top-knot pigeon and the cat bird and finally after seeking further advice and reassuring the man that we have long lenses and would not get close or disturb the bird, we finally found the original Golden Bowerbird.
These are a few of my favourite things
The Kingfishers
one day I’ll complete the collection!
Blue-winged kookaburra
Laughing Kookaburra
While having lunch after visiting the glo-worm cave at Tamborine Mountain I notice a kookaburra on the ground. Hiding behind a tree to get close to it I realise it has caught a snake. It got the snake up in a tree and bashed it against the branch and skinned it. Then it spotted me and seemed worried I’d try to take his snake so he took off with it.
The Azure Kingfisher
One of my all time favourite birds. When I was on the scienitifc expendtion studying Torresion Impreial pigeons we have a 4a.m. start to get to the boat in Port Douglas to get out to the Low Isles from where we were camped on Mount Finigan. As the sun rose and we crossed a stream I see this gorgeous orange-brease
The Forest Kingfisher
The Little Kingfisher
Now you see me, now you don’t (or empty branch syndrome)
Subtitle: A good excuse to upgrade to a new camera with Pro shot
Butterflies
The Ulysses Butterfly – also gets it’s own page
I spent hours trying to get a photo of a Ulysses butterfly after one landed on a flower at my feet while my husband was in buying us lunch, and I got a fleeting video. My husband said I was wasting my time. They fly awfully fast and erratically and are dark under their wings so they ‘disappear’ when they close their wings so they aren’t always easy to find. Then we were in Atherton on the tablelands above Cairns in Qld when I spotted one landing on a low-hanging branch. It immediately closed it wings and seemed to disappear. These photos are of it’s closed wings.
Then came the amazing long weekend when we stayed at the Big 4 caravan park in Atherton and there were hundreds of them, everywhere. Needless to say, these are the best of the hundreds (possibly thousands of photos) taken that weekend.
I don’t have a friend with butterfly knowledge so many of these are so far unidentified.
Bees
Having been to England in my early twenties with a good friend to do the Australian ‘6 months overseas’ thing, we discovered that there were such things as bumblebees. I found a dead one and brought it home with a view to encasing it in resin to use as a paperweight.
Many years later, living in Tasmania, I realised that Australia has bumbebees too. They fly against all reason being so heavy for the size of their wings that they, by rights, shouldn’t get off the ground. They are fascinating. If a bird or a camera gets too close, they stop their impressive buzzing noise and seemingly drop out of the air.
There are similar bees in Far North Queensland too but mostly black.
Dragonflies
What a magnificent array of colours, shapes and sizes. I’ve endeavoured to identify them but most remain nameless. If you know more about dragonflies, please feel free to message me.
Red ones and blues one and pretty green ones – so many colours, shapes and sizes