The Trekkie's Forum

oh that is wonderful! I have only seen Mynas today, so lucky you. Hope you got great pictures.

Shame on you MT for leaving a 'stake-out' for a speech.

Nee hell Mark.. you should win the birder of the year 2011 with ease now

@Mark and Brut
Our cat, Minki loves to nuzzle up to Ramkat's armpit in the evenings when he gets home from work. She snuffles, purrs, chews, licks his shirt pushes her head right under his arm, and squirms with ecstacy, with her eyes huge and black. It's only when he wears a certain deodorant that she reacts like that, so there may be something in what you're saying Mark! You could market a bird attractor spray, and become stinking rich!
Having said that, maybe somebody could raid Niall's bathroom cabinet,to find out what he uses - maybe he already has the "secret" spray - hence the way the birds come out to play when he's arround.

Last edited by Boskat (24-02-2011 15:03:18)

Here are my highlight shots from the Striped Crake stakeout (I have four cryptic shots of a bird smaller than the Lesser Moorhen that I was secretly pinning my hopes on to be a Crake - but they are clearly Lesser Moorhen chicks ). I am rather chuffed with the Lesser Moorhen shots - I said the bird was close!!! I usually shoot at the limit of my 300mm lens - but here I had to pull it back a bit - a new experience - was not sure if I was allowed to do that!

                                                           

Last edited by marktittley (26-02-2011 16:38:51)

Safari Ranger wrote:

You always seem to get a photo of every bird! How do you do that???

I drink so much coffee when I am out on a birding outing that I am so wired and jittery that my finger uncontrollably and continuously hits the shutter release button - and if you do shoot on average 800 pics per outing - you are bound to get shots of just about everything. But, I still miss shots - so I think I will invest in a second flask to take even more coffee out with me. Seriously, I use my camera as my binocs most of the time - which means that recording what I see is so much easier than if I was looking through my binocs. I am working on using binocs more to enjoy the sighting more, but have found that is limiting my ability to record every sighting. This is probably a tension to manage and not a problem to solve!
And I owe you for all the sms's you sent me today - warning me about birds waiting to be photographed on the others side of the road. Your cheque is in the post!

Great sightings, guys!

Well, a colleague of mine told me yesterday that he walked past this cemetery with his dogs the other day and saw these odd looking birds. He told me that he stopped counting at 30 of them. His description was quite good and it took me little time to figure out what species he was talking about. But what threw me was the number of birds together! I've never heard of that before. I showed him the photo on Roberts and he concurred to the id and then I went further and read about the beahviour and came across the above mentioned quote. I just had to go and see it for myself this morning and was I taken back by what I saw!

In my 7.5 years of birding I have never seen this before!