A feathered visitor

I was in the middle of writing an email when a raucous noise caught my attention. It was a white cockatoo that had flown down the bird feeder dish and was screaming his dissatisfaction about the cage that was preventing him from getting at the seeds.

Before I go too much further I must apologise for the state of the photos - I have recently purchased a tiny notebook for travelling and I am trying to use it to both write this little story and upload photos for use in the story on this 10 inch device. The only software I have installed is Picasa which is what I use for uploading pictures to a web album (from where I can access them to put on the blog.) So these pictures have not had any processing done to them (normally I adjust the pictures - sharpness and brightness - in Photoshop. Photoshop is rather too large a program to put on a little machine like I am using at the moment.

To continue!

I raced outside with my camera and shot two bursts on Auto setting since I thought the cockatoo would fly off as soon as I opened the door. He stayed and watched me so I switched to Manual and dialed the aperture and shutter speed and took several more shots.

I crept closer and closer and my final shot was fired just as he was taking off. With a shutter speed of only 1/60 second he is showing motion blurr! But the shot shows off the drama of the moment and the colour that is under the wings as well as on the crest.

The cockatoos are really quite large and if you have seen my previous pictures of the lorikeets on that same feeder you will appreciate the difference in size of the two birds. The cage is over the seed dish to prevent the cockatoos from flinging the pottery dish off the stand - they used to do that before we came up with the cage idea! They can still get their heads through the wire and get at the seed but they cannot stand in the dish as they want to.
Now I am going to try something I have not done before - add a little video that was taken with the Samsung point and shoot camera in movie mode.

This, if it works, will show you just a few of the birds that visit every morning and the incredible noise they make.
AJ