Birds at breakfast

Yesterday I took a little bit of video using my son's little hard drive Sony DCR-SR47 and I was rather disgusted at the quality of the images - especially since I had taken video on a boat cruise last week using the same model camera but belonging to a friend. That video was sharp and well coloured and quite comparable with stuff taken with a tape camera.
Last night I delved into the menu of Steve's camera and found that he had it set on "Standard" quality. Of course I changed it to the high quality setting and immediately the LCD screen showed a marked difference. This camera is "on" when the screen is opened. Of course the screen was open for me to access the menu. Using the menu is by touching the screen.
This morning was warm enough for breakfast on the veranda. There was no wind to give that chill that drives you indoors!
At eight o clock I put out food for the lorikeets and seeds for the finches (all wild birds) so they were all full of excitement as we sat down at the table.
I have not used the Nikon D90 for video very much so I used it today to record this little incident. The video will be added to this post as soon as it has been uploaded to Flickr (it is going to take ages today, for some reason! I suppose it is because the quality is higher than what I had yesterday!)

This seems to have been the mildest winter I can remember. There has been no ground frost this year and although there have been a few days that have been cold - they have not been too difficult to take! One year we had such a severe frost that it killed the leaves on most of the plants in my garden including those on the palm trees. The palms took over 12 months to shed all the brown leaves. I am not sorry that it hasn't happened this year.
Changing the subject!
When I edit my videos I often need to replace sound. Recording the images when the action is interesting does not always coincide with the best sound. For instance, on a recent boat trip my video was taken out on the deck in a strong breeze and the camera microphone picked up that dreadful roar. Even when the wind was not the problem the sound was more of the engine rumble than of the water splashing against the boat. This is why I have always tried to record my own background sounds - this has a strange name "foley". when I edited the video of the boat trip I was able to remove the bad sound from the sound track and replace it with sounds I have recorded and saved. Sometimes this sound was actually recorded with video - my sound recording is done with my video camera - and using "Audition" (in my case - but I think any audio editor will do the same thing) I could locate the file on my computer and click on "extract audio from video" and the sound would appear on the Audition timeline - where I could edit it. When I say "edit" that means I can remove sounds from it that are not wanted, such as shouting, dogs barking, the bang of something being put down heavily, and so forth. Once the sound is edited it can be saved with a new name as either a .wav file or .mp3 file - I usually save as .mp3. Once saved it can be used anywhere, in video or in photo montages.
My bird file is only 6% uploaded after all this time so I will publish this jotting and add the video once it is available.
My Internet connection is so slow, anyone would think that I am on dial up! Anyway, while waiting (and I am still waiting) for the movie to upload to youtube - it is only 45 seconds long!!!! - I have had time to make a batch of marmalade!
I have looked to see if adsl-2 is available but of course it is not for this patch of the Gold Coast! I should move into the country!
The speed of uploading a couple of short clips has put me off trying to put "real" videos in Youtube. The size of the movie I am trying to load is only 105mb on my hd.
AJ

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

Colour and distraction

I know I have "raved on" about the birds visiting my home previously but I cannot get enough of them! My ears are so used to their high pitched screaming that their din does not worry me any more - unless I am trying to have a conversation with someone or answering the phone! My last photo of the Lorikeets was of them during rain when their feathers were all dull so it is only right an proper that I should show how they really look!
It seems a shame that the name "King Parrot" should be given to a bird that only has two colours to show off while these superb and showy birds are mere "subjects" with a most incredible ornithological name "Thrichoglossus Haemotodus" (fortunately not known by most of us humans), so it is a good thing that we have given them a good old Ozzy name "Rainbow Lorikeet". Most of our common bird names are so obvious that if you say "Oh look there is a little finch with red eye brows" you will not be surprised if the bird book tells you that it is a "red Browed Finch"!!!! I was to begin with - but have got used to it!
Take another look at the Rainbow Lorikeets - can you see the one hanging upside down from the wire? and the one on this side standing sideways and reaching in for food? They are having a really fun time on that wire cage. The big Sulphur Crested Cockatoos (white cockatoos with a sulphur yellow crest!) are too big to get in to the feed. This is why we put the cage there. The cockatoos would, when they have finished eating, toss the dish off the feeder to the ground below. (We are on the first floor, not the ground floor in this pic, so they are banned from the feed dish!)
Every morning we would get between twenty and fifty of these lorrikeets but I always put out the same amount of diluted raw sugar - 1 litre - and four slices of white bread. Sometimes it takes a bit longer to disappear but the trees planted around the house include lots of native flowering varieties so they move on to those and get a more balanced diet. The sugar is only to draw them into the garden, the main feed is actually in the garden.
This morning I was racing around getting stuff ready for our monthly photo and video get -together. I have organised an email group of enthusiasts (and "boy" are they enthusiastic) who exchange both photos to set topics and make short videos so once a month those of us who live in this area gather to watch the videos that have been posted to us as well as videos made by local members. Anyway..... I was racing around getting ready for our day when I chanced to see a visitor on one of my roses. I dropped everything and raced upstairs to get the camera with one of my u-beaut new ND filters screwed in place and whereas once I would have reached for the spray can I nowadays reach for the Nikon or the Olympus!
Here is my visitor.....
Once I had my hopper's picture "in the can" I was once again free to race around and get things ready! I just hope he isn't going to grow to be a huge locust and gobble up all my plants. I forgot to squash it!
AJ

Drizzle after Christmas

Sad to see the festive season over, mother nature has turned on the tears. Much of the country is now in flood but here on the Gold Coast the rain is lighter and soaking into the ground. We had a gentle fall of rain through the night and when I went out this morning to feed the lorikeets I found them all over the chairs and the table trying to keep out of the weather. They looked all drab and miserable!
Feeling a bit sorry for them I gave them twice as much breakfast - they get raw sugar mixed with water. I only give them a tablespoon of sugar to a litre of water so the mix is quite thin. I have also found that the birds are not interested in the juice unless there is bread to sop it up! They like to hold the bread between their beaks and suck the juice out!
Anyway, the birds shoved and pushed their way into the sugared bread mix and gobbled it all down in the same amount of time they normally do - So I have resolved not to give in to their pleadings and give them as much as they crave, I do not want them to become dependent on being hand fed. The trees are loaded with flowers and they must work for their meals! Nectar is their main source of food but they do enjoy a few seeds too - especially sunflower seeds.Here are the wet lorikeets scrambling through the wire cage over their feed dishes. The terracotta dish contains the seeds. The cage is to keep out the large cockatoos, it does not restrict any of the other smaller birds. They do not see it as a barricade. They treat it as if it were a climbing frame.
As you can see from the colour of the birds the emerald green of the feathers has become a drab bottle green and the brilliant orange on their chests a muted red colour. After feeding the birds scattered to the trees in pairs and spent the next half hour preening - the rain stopped while they were dining.
AJ

King Parrots make a visit

As I have written in previous posts, I am visited daily by a collection of birds - lorikeets and finches. We have noticed that whenever we (Colin and I) sit down at our outdoor table for coffee or for lunch, the birds take that as a signal to fly in to feed too. Maybe the finches assume that with our presence at the table that no large aggressor will swoop down and disturb them. Perhaps they do because we can observe that they will feed in ones and twos when we are indoors spying on them through the windows but they are in large numbers when we move outside and sit down at the table.

This afternoon we had an unexpected treat.

It was the distinctive whistle that made us look up. Colin started to imitate the call and into a nearby tree flew a male King Parrot. Hoping that we could persuade him to come closer I removed the wire cage over the feed dish - this keeps the larger birds, such as cockatoos, away.

I added a handful of sunflower seeds to the dish and unleashed the camera.

We didn't have to wait long. First the King Parrot landed on a tree right beside the veranda and I took this shot of him.

Showing no fear of us at all he then flew onto the feed dish and really enjoyed himself among the sunflower and small budgie seeds. Wifey flew down to join him and she too tried to eat from the dish but the lorikeets must have realised they were missing out on something and two of them flew down and chased the timid female off the dish. She attempted to return a few times but her courage failed her and she flew over to the creeper covered stump, allowed me to take her picture and then flew away followed soon after by her handsome mate.

We may not see this pair again so I really made the most of this photo opportunity!

AJ

Feed the birds.

Every morning without fail I feed the birds. The first of my feathered friends to arrive are the lorikeets and at this time of the year they are particularly noisy and in large numbers. Not only is is mating time but there are plenty of youngsters who are now out on their own that have learned that human hand-outs are worth screeching for! These lorikeets are supposed to mate for life and yet as I watch them they seem to flirt first with one bird and then, when she rejects him by flying off, they flirt with the next nearest female! After all the twenty years of feeding the birds I still cannot tell the difference between the sexes - its just as well they can get it right!
Once the lorikeets have taken their fill of sweet water and bread - I use raw sugar in water, it is natural and does not attract the bees as honey would. The birds love it - as you can tell! - the finches come in.
I put out budgerigar seed for the finches and manage to attract three different varieties. Red Brow, Double Bar and Chestnut Breasted. The picture I have included is of Chestnut Breasted finches, they usually come in flocks, they seem to be a far more sociable bird than the other two varieties of finch. However all the finches are flighty and take fright very easily. The Chestnut Breasted are by far the most timid and must have vivid imaginations! They scatter the seed everywhere when they panic to leave!
AJ