The Salmon Sandwich Bandit!

To set the scene: a picnic at the Gold Escort ground, at Belair NP, on a glorious day in late autumn. Right. Now, I've had a Kookaburra take the tuna out of a roll in my hand before (in fact, over at Karka Pavilion, also at Belair), but this little bandit took the whole thing and zoomed up into the nearest tree. The rascal sat up there at his leisure to eat the salmon, then dumped the roll.

To add insult to injury, he came back ten minutes later and swooped again, trying to get my apple pie. He aborted at the last tenth of a second, realizing it was fruit! He got my finger instead. Ahem!

So here he is -- the now world famous Salmon Sandwich Bandit, as immortalized on Facebook. If you notice, you can see the remnants of my salmon on the branch where he's sitting. Well ... he did play fair, and strike handsome poses for me to get some lovely shots. The fifth is his "beauty shot," where he glided over to another tree and sat cackling, "Me so funny!" 

Along the way, it was a great opportunity to get in some practice with the Lumix TZ90, which I am learning to love. Boy, did I make the right decision, when it came down to deciding which camera to buy. Sure, I know, I've seen the commercials for the new 60MP Sony. But I don't happen to have A$8,000 lying around, and I don't think I could carry the Sony and its lens and battery pack around my neck all day; or even for an hour. The Panasonic Lumix is right for me, at this moment: it weighs about 350g, has excellent lens elements by Leica, and gives me more gadgets and options than I can actually use -- and it does it for around 5% of the price of the killer-diller Sony. If I miraculously get well and strong again, and win lotto, I might think about upgrading to a DSLR, but for now, I'll take technology and the sweet price!

Autumn colors 2019 ... and the empty space under the desk

Every year you wait for it, wait for it ... go "chasing fall colors" and mostly find yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time. This year we were lucky -- a sunny day at Belair NP, just coinciding with the best of the colors quite by chance. I hadn't even been thinking about this when we packed a picnic and headed for the park. Talk about luck.

There really isn't any need to write a lot: the pictures speak for themselves. So ...

In other notes, the PC has gone into the workshop for a long-overdue upgrade. There's a large empty space where it used to be, and ... and ... space to put my feet under the desk, LOL. I should get it back on Saturday or Sunday. Cheers to IT Warehouse, who built it as a "special" for Christmas, 2012: Dave told them to "build something powerful" for me, and seven years later it's still so fast, so powerful, it'll run virtually anything out there. This upgrade will extend its life for another 3-5 years. I'm getting a humongous solid state boot drive, seven new USB 3 ports, super-fast wifi adapter and so forth. Can't wait to get my teeth into a new generation of artwork next week. {Rubs hands together in gnomish glee. My precioussssss....}

Turtle spotting!

Yes, you read that right ... turtle spotting. In fact, Murray River turtles. There's quite a large and thriving colony of them in Playford Lake at Belair NP; and when the sun shines ... and when that sun is at just the right angle to strike into the water --

Sometimes you see them, sometimes you don't. They might be right there, but the sun's at the wrong angle; they also might be down deep, in which case all you see is a stream of bubbles. When they surface, sometimes they come up for a split second -- especially if they're very close to humans and catch a glimpse of you, in which case they're gone in a flash. Other times, they bask on the surface, but only way out in the lake, where you need a loooong lens to reach them.

Of course, turtles aren't the only critters around:

Talk about luck! Capture a dragonfly in flight ...
suuure, I planned this (ahem!)

A Little Raven, with bright blue eyes

A White Faced Heron ... fisherman on the lake.

A Darter, drying off in one of the big trees overhanging Playford Lake.

There are always birds galore, and when the sun shines it's a birder's and photographer's playground. It's also a lovely walk, and you meet some interesting people, usually walking an assortment of dogs, everything from the cattle dog and border collie to the huskies and malamutes...

Golden wattle

At this time of the year it's golden wattle season ... in other words, sneezin' season. Take a box of kleenex along: chances are, you'll need them! But the "enchanted forest effect" is well worth the sneezing:

On the Wood Duck Walk in spring, Playford Lake, Belair NP.

We'd packed a picnic, and after this hike and photo op we headed over to the Echo Tunnel area -- an old, rather creepy tunnel through the hillside, right under the main Belair rail line -- for a picnic before the mandatory walk through the tunnel. I'll blog that part of the story next time!

Birding ... with smoked oysters and peanut butter

Darter at Playford Lake, Belair national Park

An walk in Belair National Park and a picnic basket (loaded with home-made peanut butter, oatmeal crackers, and a can of smoked oysters) turned into an awesome opportunity to photograph birds. Dave and I have been keen "birders" for some years now, so any opportunity to photograph them is welcome; and yesterday they were out in profusion. This is the first time I've had the chance to photograph a darter (above), but now I know where they hang out, I'll be sure to get back there on a bright, blue-sky day! Fortunately, we're only about twenty minutes from the park, so with a tad bit of luck we can pick the day and run. Yesterday was not a good day for cameras.

Yesterday was white sky and light levels were far lower than the sensitive human eye actually registered... until we were actually halfway back to the car, of course. The Adelaide Hills are high enough that you can often drive into very different weather conditions as you head up. A day that's bright on the coast can be overcast "up there."  So --

Australian wood ducks with ducklings

Black faced miner

-- shots like these, above, were an absolute crapshoot. You just grabbed what you could, crossed fingers, and sorted them out later.  Then the sun came out when we were on our way back to the car and out of time, and suddenly the images are like this:

rainbow lorikeet

Australian magpie ... bumming for those smoked oysters

Waterfowl are thriving just now, with Playford Lake so full, the spillways are still running; and there are ducklings galore:

Pacific black duckling

But more this spring than in other years, we're seeing alarming levels of hybridization between duck species. The European mallard was introduced to this country in 1860-ish, because it was fancied by hunters (what a surprise); but little did they suspect that the mallard can interbreed with virtually every native duck. So you start off with the pure bred mallard -- and this one, below, is close:

mallard, close to pure-bred

... and in a few years, after Mother Nature has taken her course, you wind up with a very motley crew indeed, like this flotilla, all hanging out together, deliriously happy, and in a charming, harlequin disarray:

hybrid mallards

Some of those ducks are utterly unidentifiable! They're lovely birds, but you can spend a half hour poring over the books, trying to figure out what they are, and end ... mystified. Get out there by any lake, and you'll come up with something like this lovely girl --

Part mallard, part Pacific Black, part domestic duck. Pretty, at any rate.

...and one can only conclude, she's a bit of this, a bit of that. The ducks themselves don't mind a bit, but the fauna experts in this country are somewhat concerned that in another few years there won't be a pure-bred duck left in the wild. The thing is, there's zip to be done about it. Learn to embrace diversity, perhaps, as the ducks have already done! For the record, the Australian wood ducks, second from the top, with ducklings, and these Pacific black ducks, below, are pure:

Pacific Black Ducks

 And of course, the mallards can't interbreed with the swamp hens, moor hens and coots, so there's no danger to those populations. This guy (or gal; how do you tell the genders apart, with coots??), below, is a Eurasian coot:

Eurasian coot

 I should think the coots don't have a problem telling the genders apart, of course...

Eastern rosella

This shot at left is actually not a good picture at all; it's just the best one I was likely to get on a white-sky day when one was lamenting the light levels! Of the six or eight kinds of parrots you can see at Belair National Park, we saw four types yesterday and got the opportunity to photograph just two: the rainbow lorikeet, fourth from the top, and this little guy here: an eastern rosella. The rosellas are shyer than the lorikeets; they never show up in your backyard, and don't hang out in large numbers. The lorikeets can actually be thugs (and will strip your plum trees, if you let them), but the rosellas are very quiet and likely to vanish on sight of a camera. They're very difficult to photograph even on a bright day, and yesterday? Lucky to get a shot at all, much less one that's at the very least in focus, even if it's too "soft" to be what I'd call a good shot. Hey ho.

Must try again on a brilliant day. October's a great time for photographing wild flowers down here, so we'll be back in the park several times...