More random wildlife

Another day on Coochie-Mudlo island, a few more photos with words to go with them. What should I find first? The same pair of curlews as last time I went over, but with a new baby. The parents were nesting in some scrub, and they aren't worried by people much anymore (probably because Dad always leaves out food for them in the afternoon...) so I managed to get this close to them, but the younger baby Curlew was too frightened to let me get close enough so I left it alone.

Magpies are fun to watch. In suburbia, they screw around by swing off your clothes on the clothes line or teasing cats behind windows. Pretty smart birds really. They're extremely common, but I thought this would make a decent photo. When I first got my camera, I learned to use it by using old lenses adapted to my camera body and taking photos of magpies in a field that was near me.

This Bearded Dragon also lives in the same area as the Curlew family, and spends most of it's time hanging off this tree. It's a bit bigger than the last random reptile I took a photo of, but definitely not very aggressive.

Australia is awesome.

Exploring: Eprapah Creek

I moved house last week to an estate that backs on to Eprapah Creek, and over the last few days I have been doing a bit of exploring for a couple of reasons, one is to collect some food for my fish and some native water plants for the tank, and the other is because I just plain love exploring random bushland. You can find all sorts of random things pretty easily, especially if you know what wallaby trails look like. They tend to cut through the bush finding places to get water and also to rest, so it makes sense to just follow where they go and eventually you'll end up at a nice spot to rest. But it's not all easy going, sometimes you have to do a bit of this:

After a few more dodgy log walks across much larger spans of water, and a bit of being a ninja across some rocks I found this little fella:

And then I followed another wallaby track to my final spot, a section of faster moving water in Eprapah Creek. I did set out with the intention of finding a spot like this, since I'd never tried long exposure photos of moving water before.

Both photos I had settings of f22, ISO 100 and a 5 second shutter speed. I also set a timer of 2 seconds, because the tripod had a little shake in it when I pressed the shutter button.

This spot was actually a thriving little ecosystem, I picked up a couple of plants for my aquarium and some native snails too. There were quite a few native rainbow fish feeding on mosquito larvae and tons of fry feeding on algae. It is actually legal to take rainbow fish from the wild to keep, but I decided to wait until the fry are a bit older so that I don't impact the breeding cycle.

Last one, is a HDR. I'm really shocking at doing these since I hardly ever do them, but I thought I might include this one since it turned out alright: