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.
The last two weekends Mrs Schmitz and I had the pleasure to camp in direct vicinity of these hyperactive tiny birds which enriched our early mornings with their chirping. Camping is one of the activities I never truly understood until we moved to Australia, a country obviously ideal for a recreational lifestyle based upon nothing else then a tent and a bonfire.
This member of the family Halcyonidae or tree kingfishers lives in the mangroves, forests and river valleys in wide parts of Australia. We spotted the particular bird you can see here recently in Northern Queensland but our first encounter with the species was in the famous Barmah Red Gum Forests in the Murray-Darling Basin on the border of Victoria and New South Wales, an area hard hit by drought until recently.
This large wading bird of the heron family uses its long, sharp bill not only to spear fish but also to feed on young Saltwater or Estuarine crocodiles. Of all the deadly hazards nature has in store for us humans in Australia, the so called Salties are the most consistent killers with approximately one to two fatal attacks reported per year in the country.
