Bird Disturbing

As you probably noticed, I've retired Dinkycam because I have a nicer camera now.

The other day I went for a walk around town to try and take some nice photos of the area I live in, especially since the weather has been warm enough for me to do so.
I figured I'd be able to get some pictures of the many birds and animals that come in to town. I've seen many different ones, like rosellas, cockatoos, kangaroos and koalas, but have never had a camera handy.

So, I set out for the bushland on the edge of town.

There's a trail that goes up behind the scout hall, through the trees. You'd expect it to go on for some distance, but suddenly, when you reach the top, you get to a barbed-wire fence and you see this:

It's an empty field, that goes on to - nothing. You see nothing but the grass. It's eerie. It's like you are almost on the edge of the world...
So I turned around, and took some pictures of the bushland, which looks nicer than the brown grass in the field.

Much nicer. There were heaps of birds flitting around on the ground and in the trees. There were many rosellas hiding in the shrubs, but I couldn't get close enough to take a decent photo of them. The camera only has a 3x zoom on it, which meant I could have taken a photo of some blobby thing sitting something in a tree, but nothing better I'm afraid.

After trying unsuccessfully to capture a decent bird picture, I gave up. I figured pictures of trees were easier to get, the subject not being fussy about posing for me:

I kept going around the town, and eventually took some photos of less-colourful birds, such as this magpie who wasn't sure what to make of me:

I then heard a strange bird call coming from one of the trees in front of me. I looked up, and saw a black feathered head peeking out from the leaves, and I realised that it was a black cockatoo! These are supposed to be really rare, almost an endangered species! So I quickly tried to turn my camera back on... but before I could hold it up, the birds (there were two of them in the tree!) flew off behind me. (sad)
Here's a picture of the tree where they used to be:

Onward, and I found some more birds in a different area. Mostly magpies and other common types:

But most of the other birds flew off before I could get a good snap of them.

But, it seems that not everything was scared off by me. A little green bug landed on my hand while I was taking pictures:

It was so tiny! I tried to make it fly off, but I guess it didn't want to leave me so easily. I managed to eventually coax it onto a fence post, as it wouldn't have been very convenient for the bug if I'd squashed it or something.

Then, I saw what I thought were a couple of birds, sitting under a tree! I went closer, and they seemed unafraid of me:

Then I found out what they were actually doing:

I disposed of the "birds" thoughtfully.

By now, I had just about given up on seeing any decent bird life. I had plenty of trees to snap, but who hasn't seen a tree before? But then I remembered that there were usually lots of birds down by the lake!
So that was where I went next.

As you can tell by these pictures, it was starting to get late, so I headed off back home.
On the way, there was another little pond where water birds were gathering, so I took a couple of pictures of those - but it turned out that there was someone else watching what I was doing:

I moved around so that they could get a better look at me:

I left them to mind their own business, and took some pictures of an old house down by the lake:

And then I decided I'd had enough fun walking around town, and headed home (taking some photos of ducks on the way):

By the time I got back home, my feet were so sore, they were glowing (I could tell, it was really dark by then). I didn't mind - it meant that I managed to get some exercise, and have something to put up on the blog that wasn't just me bitching about my teeth or whinging about work.

If you want to see some more photos of the part of the world I live in, [here's the link to the Picasa album that contains the rest]. It also contains some photos of our backyard, and our cats, if you're into that sort of thing.