Birds breakfast time - and off again!

After having a week away from my blog I am giving it a shot in the arm today! I love the birds that visit our home in the sub tropics, they have become very quiet and trusting. The three bird pictures I have uploaded to this blog were all taken in the morning (yesterday) and are all of birds enjoying their breakfast. The first image shows the clutter of Rainbow lorikeets as they squabble, push and shove as they try to get the most sweet juice and bread from the dish - yes there is a dish under all those green feathers! Actually there are two dishes, one contains small wild bird seeds and a handful of sunflower seeds while the other - the one these birds are fighting to get to, has a litre of water mixed with a couple of tablespoons of raw sugar and four slices of White bread saturated with the liquid. If they could squeeze through the crowd the black drongos would also love to get at this sweet treat! They are rather more timid. I have told you in earlier blogs about Twisty Beak, He (or is it she?) has been a regular visitor to our home for several years, he has a deformed lower beak and when a very young bird we took special care of it always putting out a dish of sweet juice and bread and keeping the other birds away. Now he comes in and helps us eat our own breakfast - yesterday he had the best time of his life - he was given permission to lick the marmalade jar!Son Steven went outside with a small piece of meat off the dog roll and was bombarded with a family of Butcher Birds. They will not sit quietly and take the food from your fingers but dash in and snatch it before you can pull it away! Thanks to the delay on the camera (using the Samsung NV3) it took a few attempts to get the timing right. I focused on Steven's fingers and held the shutter part down and pressed just as the bird lifted off the railing.

Colin and I left home soon after 1.45 - we had intended to leave at one but I had so many camera things to load that I was the one responsible for the delay! As well as the usual still cameras and a small video camera for incidental movies I needed to take a good video camera, microphone, headphones, tripod and extension leads for the camera workshop on Thursday. Its a good job that this Video Convention is in Australia because I would definitely have to pay excess on the extra weight if it was overseas! The chargers and batteries for everything electronic - including the laptops all adds up. intend to try and edit the video as I go along so that might prove to be a challenge. I have a swag of copyright free music in my laptop and I did remember to bring the firewire cable!

So here we are at Noosa Heads. I am showing a picture taken from the front veranda and a second picture that shows the place I stood to take the picture.

The housekeeping is not as good here as we have found in every other place we have stayed. The first thing I had to do before I could cook our evening meal was to wash the floors! The kitchen floor was sticky and the floor in the bathroom absolutely "grotty". It didn't even look as if it had been swept properly in ages, hair and sand in every corner. I will be saying something in the morning you can be sure!
There is a festival of some sort happening here tomorrow so maybe I will have a few interesting shots to share! watch this space!

AJ