Birdy Hide and Seek

Sometimes when I ride my bike through the bush I like to go really really fast. 

Wooooo hooooo!!!

But today I wanted to go very slow so that I could photograph the beautiful birds that play in the trees by the lake.

 

The problem is, whilst these birds are very noisy, they are also very very shy.

 

Stand still for a few minutes and you will see one finch hopping on a branch, then another finch, and maybe a wagtail, then another bird until you realise these birds are everywhere - you just have to stand very very still.

 

Catch a glimpse of the little things and you will see how beautiful they really are. 

So my photos today look like bird version of Where's Wally but it was the best I could do without standing like a statue for half an hour.  

One of my favourite books (such a geek) is Robert Hughes The Fatal Shore which is about the colonisation/invasion of Australia by the English. I think he describes the bush perfectly...

'...the landscape was alive, but secretively so. Here in the Australian bush one needed to look, and look again, before glimpsing the gray koala camouflaged against the fleshy gray burl of its gum tree. The voices of the animals tended to be out of all proportion to their size. Just as space was drained of perspective by the random, flickering of the trees, so it was hard to guess where sounds originated' (p.7).

I love the bush

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