Whilst I’m a fairly novice bird watcher, Suki the cat had always a great interest in birds for her own reasons. With the exception of cooked specimens, I tended to ignore feathered animals before I moved to Australia in late 2005 to join Mrs. Schmitz in Sydney. This changed soon after we settled in the suburb of North Bondi where the sheer abundance of colourful and exotic species sparked my interest in avian topics. I started to write down bird inspired observations which I put on this little weekly blog about Australia, Sydney and the feathered and not feathered locals.
As much as I love birds I have no sympathies for this particular thieving feathered bushranger who snatched my last pork and fennel sausage from right under my nose. Take this from an innocent victim, there is a whole gang of avian bandits waiting for you - if you are brave enough to camp in Myall National Park - consisting of tricky and fearless members belonging to a couple of species.
I took the picture of this elegant long-legged wader at Sydney Olympic Park, an area that before being redeveloped for the 2000 Olympics was home to brickworks, slaughterhouses and armament depots as well as being the site for eight of Sydney's rubbish dumps.
These medium sized robins are incredibly inquisitive and confident with humans and contrary to most of their feathered colleagues don’t mind being photographed by bird nerds like me prowling around in their habitat. It takes a brave little robin to pose fearlessly for such a strange towering mammal of the human kind, in my case additionally fitted with various cameras and binoculars that I rise in turns to my head and point in direction of the poor little bird.