Natural splendour, real musics, wines, wordpower
You are looking at part of the largest of five such graveyards in Port Adelaide.
All will be explained in a few episodes’ time.
Suffice for now that these graveyards’ occupants are not human corpses or skeletal remains, and that various living beings – plants, birds, fish, reptiles and mammals – thrive in these graveyards.
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The pictured birds are teals.
These very common dabbling ducks are no less lovely for being “common”.
Probably, this post’s heroines are grey teals, but they just might be chestnut teals, or hybrids.
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Our local lake never disappoints.
That said, bird-wise, the least interesting time is during Perth’s cooler, rainier months.
Then, migratory birds have all flown north – some of them, to far-off places in Eurasia.
Other birds spread out across southwestern WA; with water and food generally-available, they do not need to congregate around “permanent” bodies of water such as Lake Monger.
Still, as today’s & tomorrow’s posts illustrate, at Lake Monger there is always some avian activity to enjoy…
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Most human observers cannot accurately “read” a bird’s face.
So, the “quirkiness” of a particular bird species – or the “quirkiness” of a particular bird’s appearance/demeanour at a particular moment – is usually all about human perception/misperception.
Typically, it has little or no informed connection to the bird’s actual nature/intent/emotional state.
That said, to this human observer at least, the pictured individual looked marvellously quirky at 6.29 pm on 20 February 2023.
Both of us were on the shoreline of India’s longest lake, shortly before darkness fell.
Comments closedWhat is a “quirky moment”?
The answer is largely a matter of the relevant human observer’s/participant’s experience, sensibility, attitude.
One person’s “surprising” or “bizarre” or “amusing” is another’s “to be expected, in this particular context”, “prosaic”, or “unremarkable”
What is happening in the featured image is a case in point.
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A heron (or egret) in hunting mode delivers a fascinating, repeating sequence of events.
For unpredictably short or long periods the heron is a study in concentration and stillness, until that stillness is suddenly shattered by the bird’s speargun-like attack.
The prey – usually a small fish, crustacean, mollusc, amphibian or insect – is swallowed, rapidly.
The sequence then repeats…
For obvious reasons, a photographer cannot “capture” this behaviour from a very close vantage point, directly in front of the heron’s beak/“speargun”.
However, one can sometimes get surprisingly close, “from behind”.
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Many birds can swivel their heads across a much greater arc than we humans can.
This is good news for bird photographers; a “from behind” image does not always lack the relevant bird’s watchful gaze…
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Long before Europeans reached Australia, what is now “Perth’s Pelican Point” was already a place of considerable significance to both humans and birds.
Given its inner urban location – as a bird flies, a couple of minutes or less from the CBD of a metropolis – it is no small achievement that the bipeds who effectively “own” Pelican Point’s actual point are avian, not human.
In the featured image: white-headed stilts, black swans, and a little pied cormorant.
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As you can see, on 18 April 2023, Perth and its big estuary – the Swan River – were bathed in bright sunlight.
It was a perfect day to enjoy good things which are not so readily available – all, within just part of a single day – to most urban humans.
Where else would convenient, uncommonly cheap public transport (free, to “seniors”, outside “rush” hours) deliver you to one of Australia’s better pub lunches, after which the nearby riverside presents you with kilometres of glorious, publicly-accessible, uncrowded foreshore?
Even if you simply zip down to-fro the nearby jetty, you will enjoy a splendid vista and – almost certainly – a close encounter of the pelican kind.
And if you bother to walk along the foreshore….
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You can see this post’s species in Australia too, but not with such a spectacular, snow-capped backdrop.
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