Luck's spotty, like the birds

Luck's been spotty with birds spotted in the distance. Didn't even know the Nankeen Night Heron (Nycticorax caledonicus) disappearing fast from view at Tyto today was a spotty juvenile till I downloaded the images. From distance the bird looked a somewhat drab adult.

Pheasant Coucal (Centropus phasianinus), in black and brown breeding plumage, is more streaked than spotted, and more often spotted running along the ground looking - as in Judith Wright's marvellous set of bird poems - like a granny tripping along tiptoe with skirts up.

Difficult to catch these crafty birds in clear view, on boughs or in the air. They almost invariably clamber high within a tree and launch themselves out the other side away from perceived danger. Their flight is not so clumsy as often described.

Though from the cuckoo family, it's hard to see much about them that other cuckoos would admire. Pheasant Coucals build their own ground nests, incubate the eggs, feed the young, and generally behave like good bird parents.

If they stopped eating other birds' eggs and young all would be happy. I guess they won't and will continue to be mobbed as relentlessly as, say, Blue-winged Kookaburras and Little Eagles.

Spotted close to the long-deserted nest, the quicksilver pair of Lovely Fairy-Wrens. As ever, they flashed across a track, spent a split-second in lantana close to their decaying nest, and disappeared into thick tangles of more lantana and guavas. But I will get them!

Also spotted from distance - and genuinely spotty - this Wood Sandpiper (Tringa glareola), at the mill treatment ponds yesterday evening. We played a wee game of see-if-the-photographer-falls-in-the-scum-chasing-the-bird-beside-the-pond - and declared it a 0-0 draw: no top shots of bird, no muddy feet for me. Meantime, the mystery dark sandpiper of last week was nowhere to be seen.


And here's a biggie to finish. The best-conditioned, thickest Amethyst Python (Morelia amethistina) I've yet seen in Tyto. About 3.5 metres of muscular, shimmering gorgeousness, so heavy it left deep grooves in the shortish wet grass. Perfection! Until it came to keeping its tongue in frame and itself out in the open.

What do you say to an almost 12-foot snake as it goes by? So long! What else could you say?

Spot you later, as they say.


An afterword: Problems with downloading pictures, formats that kept changing, and supposedly lost internet connections added at least an hour to posting this blog. Do others strike similar posts or days? It's maddening to space everything perfectly, introduce another image and find spacing's gone haywire and font and type size has changed. Happens whether I paste stuff in or enter it directly.