There were 50-100 Needletails hawking for several hours this afternoon
over the long grass flat to the east of the Kobble Ck inlet to Lake
Samsonvale. Normally the Needletails I see don't hang around one place
for more than 15-30 mins, but this group were obviously onto a good
thing. There wasn't much in the way of a breeze for most of the
afternoon, so it was like watching a mass of super fast and super large
martins milling about - sometimes the birds were flying only a metre
above the top of the chest-high grass.
I found that photographing low-flying swifts was more of a challenge
than photographing birds from the back of a boat. While I didn't have
to contend with a rocking surface, swifts are pretty much the fastest
bird when it comes to level flight and they don't fly in a predictable
pattern, so they are hard to track. Invariably, the ones that did the
closest flybys approached from behind me. The autofocus on the camera
couldn't cope, so it was a case of switching to manual and hitting the
shutter when the birds were in focus.
Regards, Laurie.
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