Skip to content →

Pelican Yoga Posts

“Landscape” view/much closer view (#1A in series: Sesriem Canyon)

 

 

Whether or not you are taking photographs – and wherever you happen to be – it is always worthwhile, often, to change your field of view from narrow to wide, and to shift your focus from somewhere/something near to somewhere/something distant…and vice-versa.

Doing so will help your eyes to work better, for longer…and you will enjoy many wonderful sights that you would have missed, had your focus and field of view remained “fixed”.

(it is also a good idea – most especially if you enjoy wildlife encounters – to turn around and look behind you, frequently …but “turning around” is not this series’ concern)

The series begins in the Namib, the world’s oldest desert…

Leave a Comment

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”.

Leave a Comment

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.

Leave a Comment

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.

Leave a Comment

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.

Leave a Comment

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.

Leave a Comment

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.

Leave a Comment

Port River (#16 in series: no place like dome)

 

You are looking at Port Adelaide’s most arresting (and “enigmatic”)  21st century structure.

You may be relieved to know that it has nothing to with nuclear power!

As a construction industry journal headline put it, on the 2nd day of February 2023:

Hallett Group erects world’s largest drive-through Domesilo concrete facility

The timing of that story’s publication was exquisitely unfortunate.

On that very day – barely a week after the balloon-like structure’s erection/inflation – it burst, very spectacularly:

Leave a Comment