In Maryborough, QLD is a decent sized park called Ululah Lagoon and Waterbird Sanctuary. I've written about it briefly before a few months ago in the post: Photo Sunday ~ Ululah Lagoon.
Today, due to a power outage that cut short my initial plans of spending the day writing in Scrivener and my partner's plans of living in Halo: Infinite, we decided to go to Ululah and have lunch and the boy could also play on the playground while I went and harassed the birds with my camera.
I think this little fellow, and the one in my header image, are egrets of some sort. I could be wrong though. I've tried looking through bird identifying websites and I think they look like young egrets.
As always, there were plenty of ibises at the lagoon. Also lovingly known as the Australian Bin Chicken.
These creatures have practically overtaken the lagoon. Years ago the lagoon was filled with swans, ducks, and geese with hardly an ibis in sight. Now there is maybe one family of ducks, one family of geese, and a massive mass of ibises.
I'm not particularly fond of them, but they've become somewhat of an icon here now thanks to the Bin Chicken meme.
After grudgingly taking a few shots of the ugly ibises, a great squawking came from overhead and I realised we were surrounded by cockatoos. And I happily took advantage of their proximity!
And I was unhappy to discover that my camera was starting to act up a bit.
I've had this Nikon D5000 for a long time. This issue started a few years ago and then stopped, and has now started again. Whenever I'm in manual mode and trying to adjust things properly on my camera, it's like the light sensor inside goes haywire and refuses to capture images properly.
It gets to the point where I have to take the same photo 4 or 5 times to get one of the correct exposure. It drives me crazy. And is especially annoying when trying to take photos of live subjects and not just landscape images.
But at least this flock of cockatoos were kind enough to stay in their tree and not fly away after I intruded upon their space. So I was able to get several shots of them.
These birds were quite happy for me to be photographing them. One of them kept waving his foot at me, likely trying to shoo me away, but I wasn't able to capture it due to aforementioned exposure issues.
I really need to invest in a new camera body one of these days! I'm hoping for the D7500, but by the time I save enough it'll probably be discontinued just like the 7200 was, which was the original one I wanted. 😅
At last, after a couple of hours had passed, we went back home to find the electricity back on and there was much rejoicing! It was a HOT day today! 😅 So grateful to be back in air conditioning.
Until next time! 🦆
All photos in this post are courtesy of me, 