Leanne and I were showing a guest around Springbrook on Saturday and
found ourselves at the Best of All Lookout a bit after 2 pm. This
happened to coincide with the arrival of all manner of tour busses, so
I was very surprised to come across an Albert's Lyrebird casually
scratching and warbling [bowerbird calls] about 10 metres off the side
of the track.
Normally Albert's are extremely shy and high-tail it as soon as they
see you, but this chap didn't mind an audience. I am not sure if this
chap was Syd's mate George, but he had a well developed lyre [not that
he was displaying at the time] and the ground beside the track was very
well raked for 100 metres.
Since I had the digital camera on me, I couldn't resist the opportunity
to photograph a tame Albert's at such a close range that it filled the
viewfinder. Unfortunately, digital cameras are not in their element in
the rainforest - they struggle to focus in low light situations and my
camera seems to impose a minimum aperture equivalent equivalent to f8 -
f11 at the higher magnifications.
The upshot of this was that I couldn't get a useable shot of the chap,
for all the time I had to photograph it - I needed a minimum speed of
1/30 of a second, and the best I could get was about 1/8 [at any sort
of higher magnification you need a modicum of speed, even if the bird
is totally still - which is not the case for birds scratching about].
When on Sunday, we happened to be at Walkabout Ck [at the Gap] so I
took the opportunity to spend a bit of time learning how to drive the
'bus' in low light - photographing the tame BB rails, E whipbirds, S
and R bowerbirds and N pitta in the walk-through aviary. Basically I
found that by under-exposing by a couple of stops I could get a sharp
enough image - that could subsequently be brightened on the computer.
As a point of interest, I watched a mature male satin bowerbird
interacting with a subadult male at his bower - the interesting thing
was that he flicked his tail and wings at the same point in his buzzing
routine.
Regards, Laurie.
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