I took the day off work to carry out some personal errands, which also gave me an excuse to walk back from Phillip. I took my camera with me as I was walking in the morning so I was hopeful I would be able to take photos of the birds I encountered along the way. It was a windy morning with clouds blowing across the sun but I was still able to take some photos. The light could have been better but it was not too bad. I found some more Satin Bowerbirds as well as a flock of Sulphur-crested Cockatoos, who I sat and watched for a little while.
The photographs below may make people feel I am obsessed with the Crested Pigeon but that is not the case. These are common birds that happened to be among the first birds I saw this morning. They were feeding on the lawn in the Woden Cemetery. They were untroubled by other birds and were not worried about me being too close. There was a group of about five or six walking slowly as they bobbed down to eat their food. I almost thought they were blinking whenever they ate food based of one photo where both pigeons had their eyelids closed while their heads were down. I looked at some other shots of the same birds, which helped me conclude it must have been coincidence of me taking a photo when I dd, catching both birds blinking.
Every Australian knows the Galah due to the word also being part of Australian slang for an idiot. I have grown to like the Galah during my time in Canberra with their distance pink and grey plumage. They are very common in Canberra. I came across two groups of them feeding on the grass in different locations. Their beaks allow them to dig at the roots of the grass, with the resultant dirt traces obvious in the photos below. The Galahs below are the albicepssub-species.
I am always a sucker for a Satin Bowerbird, so I was really excited when I saw three females in an area I did not expect to see them. There was no real undergrowth although the young trees were growing close together. There was also a group of three or four Pied Currawongs slightly higher in the trees making their distinct calls, although they did not seem to be in conflict with the Bowerbirds. The Bowerbirds were very hard to approach, disappearing into the tangle of branches when I started to approach, two of them even flew off. I thought I had missed my chance to photograph them when the third one hopped onto a log in easy camera view. She looked to be interested in something in the wood pulp of a fallen tree, although she did not go down to get it. She also flew off after a while.
The stars of today for me were the Sulphur-crested Cockatoos, as I wrote above, I just enjoyed sitting down to watch them feeding. I had a genuine contemplative moment sitting down watching a flock graze over a grassy slope. In my opinion, sometimes birds, when they are walking on the ground, exude their dinosaur heritage. For me, this group of Cockatoos could have been dinosaurs without much change to their appearance. I wonder if their modern behaviour echoed their long dead ancestors. Every now and then, two of them would have a squawk at each other, raise their yellow combs and sometimes flap their wings. One of them would then back away. There were also times when two birds would almost size each other up before both avoided the confrontation. They were going after the grass routes with their beaks before using their left claws to hold the soil covered root while they ate the parts they wanted. A Long-billed Corella joined the flock without anybody taking exception.
The Long-billed Corella that joined the group of Cockatoos
I also came across two introduced species, the European Goldfinch and the Common Starling.
European Goldfinch
Common Starling