Antipodean Adventures in Birdwatching: Part 3 - The joy of seeing something new

Updated: Mar 12, 2023

I’ve now been in Australia for a few weeks and in amongst other sightseeing. I have had the chance to see so many new (to me) species of birds.

This is always a bit of thrill – putting new species onto the ever growing list of types of birds I have seen and then if I’m lucky also adding them to my list of birds I’ve successfully photographed.

Striated heron

There have been so many interesting birds that if I wrote something about each one then this wouldn’t be a blog, but something nearer a book.

However a few observations and themes

They see them very differently…

This is perhaps best exemplified by the Australian Ibis – something I have always thought of as an exotic water bird and some of my shots reflect this but over here they are most commonly known as 'bin-chickens' as they are very prevalent in urban areas, scavenging food and indeed stealing it from cafés and even people n the way some British seagulls do

Bin-chicken in a cafe

Colourful and/or exotic

Rather like the fish on the great barrier reef (if you have ever been lucky enough too go snorkelling there) the colours are fabulous; bold and bright. An obvious example is the Rainbow lorikeet which does in fact have most of the colours of the rainbow as part of their plumage – but birds with bright yellows, blues, greens, pinks are everywhere

Rainbow Lorikeets

Blue-faced honeyeater

Corella

And that proverbial ‘same but different’

These are the birds that sound the same but are different – like magpies. Australian magpie are black and white but the patterning is very different (and I’m still not sure I can always quickly distinguish them from Butcher birds.)