The ladies working at the Uniting Church Op shop inspired us to do so. Their names were Primrose and Gladys.
It's late and I'm tired, so this will be another shortish post.
We saw so much wildlife today, but missed some great photo opportunities because of our poor timing, the harsh midday light or highways without stopping areas.
We went for a drive off the highway to Nowa Nowa and found a beautiful little area with a boat ramp into the Snowy River. There were birds singing all over the place, including Fairy Wrens. The river was clean and clear and we could see good sized fish swimming in the water.
After a couple of short walks along paths designed for people like us, we started back to the car, when I noticed a white bellied sea eagle soaring above the river.
I rushed over with my camera, just in case it decided to dive into the river for a fish, but it disappeared across the river and behind the trees.
Just as we thought it was over, another one flew out of the trees and flew directly in front of me, but I wasn't quick enough it too disappeared behind trees, never to be seen again.
Further up the highway, we decided to turn down the road to Bemm River. It was on the way there that we discovered an Echidna waddling across the road ...
We saved him from a certain death because there were a lot of cars towing big boats driving along that road.
Bemm River was nothing spectacular and after a brief stop, we decided to back track and stop at some interesting places along the road where we noticed an old bridge and a short nature walk along the river.
Near the bridge, we could hear running water, like a waterfall, so Primrose decided to investigate by following a very rough, narrow track down to the water. There were exposed tree roots, long grasses, deep drops to step down etc, so I told her to go ahead and let me know if it was worth the effort.
After a while she called out that I should follow her.
I swore and cursed all the way, annoyed that my little old legs could not make the short trek easy, all the while calling out to Primrose that "it better be worth a broken frigging neck"
I finally made it, only to discover lots of rocks, running water over the rocks and a few shags sitting on those rocks.
I complained "Oh so worth it to photograph a couple of stinking shags on rocks!!" (Mostly tongue in cheek mind you!)
Suddenly, Primrose shushed me and asked how small an Azure Kingfisher was.
My mission this trip was to photograph an Azure Kingfisher.
She pointed, and there in a tree just across the water from me, was a beautiful Azure Kingfisher. It dived into the shallow waters for food and returned to same branch each time. This went on for about 5 minutes and then he decided to come even closer, perching on a branch just across from me. He preened himself for a while, then dived again into the pool under his branch.
If he caught anything, it must have been small because he didn't have anything in his beak each time he landed back on the branch.
I got in a lot of shots, but the bright midday light didn't help, nor did my slow focussing mechanism on the poor old camera, however I got a couple of acceptable shots.
So, YES! It was worth risking a broken neck to get my Azure Kingfisher shot! I got it and thank you Primrose for leading me to my prize!
Now I need to sleep, so here are a few photos of the last two days.
Not such a short post after all!
Nite al.l
No comments:
Post a Comment