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...