birding-aus

The things you find in photographs

To: Birding Aus <>
Subject: The things you find in photographs
From: L&L Knight <>
Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2008 21:38:26 +1000
I was at the Manly wader roost [SEQ] the other day putting my new camera lens through its paces. It [Sigma 80-400 OS] is a definite improvement over the old lens, and looking at the pictures on the screen, enabled me to see things that I didn't pick up in the field.

For example, I was photographing the gossip of tattlers that assemble on the back of the rockwall beside the boat harbour - there were a dozen of the locally [green] flagged tattlers among the hundreds of birds there. On examination, in one shot, I found a blue [Japanese] flagged tattler and an orange [Victorian] flagged Curlew Sandpiper in the edges of a shot I took of a green flagged tattler. I certainly didn't seen the blue and orange bands when I was looking at the birds.

I also took a quite few shots of a group of golden plovers - I found at least one bird that was free of the spangling that characterises golden plovers [it wasn't a Grey], which was interesting, because it was a type of plumage that none of my field guides note.

Looking at a couple of clear flight shots [very much a matter of luck] I also noticed a fair bit of variation in the extent to which the plovers' feet projected beyond their tails - in some cases it appeared to be comparable to the length of the birds' bills while it was negligible in other cases. [This is interesting, because foot projection is supposed to be one of the diagnostic features for separating Pacific / American / European Golden Plovers].

Regards, Laurie.
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