20191020-MMPI0053 - Toowong Cemetery and Brisbane Botanic Gardens
On Sunday 20th October 2019 I walked from my home through nearby Toowong Cemetery (Queensland, Australia), to Brisbane Botanic Gardens at Mt. Coot-Tha. In the cemetery I was looking for the newly-arrived Channel-billed Cuckoos, down from Papua New Guinea to lay their eggs in nests of surrogate parents such as Magpies, Currawongs and Crows. While I saw several of these large, noisy birds, I was only able to get close to one bird. I found a pair of Kookaburras that may be nesting in a nearby arboreal ant mound on a tree, one of these birds is the same one with broken upper bill that I saw on previous trip. Over at the Botanic Gardens, I was interested in finding the recently hatched Dusky Moorhen chicks that I saw a few weeks before on a family trip to the gardens. That was a success, I got some good shots of these rough-looking little chicks feeding from their parents, swimming around and walking on lilypads. I was also able to find the Australasian Grebe chick and its parents that I photographed a few weeks earlier, it has grown quite a bit and was very calm, giving me some great close shots with some nice demure looks while swimming on the pond. As there are many people around the pond all day, this chick has grown up much less flighty than other Grebes I see at less busy waterways. They normally dive when you come close, this little one and its parents are just used to the human traffic and make really good photographic subjects. The Hardhead ducks were quite amiable that day, swimming over to me and getting to close to focus on at one stage. At one stage I heard alarm calls ringing out, looking up it didn't take long to find the reason for the warnings - a Brown Goshawk soared overhead. I later got some more photos of this beautiful raptor at the cemetery, perched in a tall conifer tree and once again soaring on the lookout for prey. This was a nice morning, lying down and waiting for the birds to come to me worked really well, the low perspective along the water surface as low as I could get really changes the backdrop compared to shooting down onto the bird in the water. Getting down to eye level and getting eye contact with the little Grebe chick made for some really nice shots,. Being solo on this trip meant I had some times of waiting where I was able to just put the camera down and generally soak up the environment and wildlife - a good tonic for the soul.
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