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Tag: Perth

NOT “bin chickens”: footnote to just-concluded series

 

Most Australian humans live in substantial cities.

Until late in the 20th century, ibis were not a “regular part of the urban scene”; urban humans who had seen ibis had usually seen them only when said humans “got out of town”.

Mid-20th century humans did not refer to Australian white ibis as “bin chickens – Threskiornis molucca was yet to “invade” our cities.

Back then, the ibis most familiar to Australians was Threskiornis spinicollis – the straw-necked ibis, aka “the farmer’s friend”.

All ibis pictured in this post are of the farmer-friendly kind, but photographed well within a metropolis.

Many (most, I suspect) city-resident humans who encounter these ibis wrongly assume that they are yet more “bin chickens”.

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Roosting, Lake Monger (“6”, final in series: penthouse suites)

 

 

 

This little series concludes a few minutes after sundown, looking at some “premium real estate” on the western side of inner-urban Perth’s Lake Monger.

i think the new overnight-roosters have supplanted the immediately-preceding “tenants”: respectively, ibis and corellas.

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Roosting, Lake Monger (“5” in series: corellas too)

 

 

This post’s photo was taken only a few seconds after the previous post’s.

As you can see, the “bin chickens” were not the only birds then coming in to roost at Lake Monger.

In recent months corellas have absolutely ravaged previously well-grassed parts of the Lake’s southern shoreline.

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Roosting, Lake Monger (“4” in series: settling in for the night)

 

This post’s photo was taken just after sunset, less than two minutes after the previous post’s.

If I had pointed my camera at the pictured branches a few minutes earlier, they would have been “empty”, and most of the pictured birds would not yet even have flown into our field of view.

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Roosting, Lake Monger (“2”: graceful)

At 6.20 pm on the last day of March 2024 we were standing  beside the western shore of Lake Monger.

The setting sun had just “disappeared”, now hidden by the low slope behind us.

However, in the sky above us, the last of that day’s direct sunbeams were able to reach the underside of the pictured ibis.

It was just beginning its descent.

A few seconds later it joined a rapidly-growing number of roosting “bin chickens”, settling in for the night.

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Roosting, Lake Monger (“1” in series: not graceful?)

 

The very same bird can “look” very different, depending on the observer’s knowledge/ignorance, that observer’s particular preconceptions/prejudices, and the bird’s current activity/stance/position.

And if one is photographing a bird that is both much-loved and widely-loathed, it is easy for a photographer to pander to – or to defy – “negative” or “positive” preconceptions about it.

This little series features one such species.

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Summer solstice in Perth/ seasonal greetings to all

 

 

 

In the title-song on her 1974 LP, Court and Spark, Joni Mitchell called Los Angeles city of the fallen angels.

In December 2023  “The Terrace” – the unusually long through street in the non-Scottish Perth’s CBD – has a lot of upstanding angels, along with banners that declare Christmas Lives Here.

Needless to say, their presence will be brief.

And – as you can see in the featured image – they are dwarfed by towers, named after the temporal powers that have prevailed here, year round, since the 1960s.

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Shenton Bushland: flowering

 

 

On the afternoon of 26 August 2023 Shenton Bushland was already very colourful, although “peak Springtime flowering” was probably still a few weeks away.

None of this post’s flowers are hard to find at this time of year, providing you are in the right kind of place, within southwest Western Australia.

Shenton Bushland is one of several “right kinds of place” that are less than 20 minutes away from Perth’s CBD.

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