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A Day with Night-herons
Morning on the wing
Photographing birds in flight requires a steady hand and a fast shutter speed. Also a camera and a flying bird, but I’m assuming you know that already. But I don’t have a steady hand, so I rely on luck and shutter speed. All the photos here were taken at 1/2000 s, which is enough to freeze the subjects in mid-flap. It is also fast enough to compensate for my wobbly deployment of the telephoto lens. Honestly, the way I wave that camera around, you’d think I was divining for water.
The Rufous Night-heron (Nycticorax caledonicus) is found from the Philippines and eastern Indonesia, through Australia and New Guinea, to New Zealand and the islands of the western Pacific. It is also called the Nankeen Night-heron because the plumage resembles the buff-coloured cloth once manufactured in Nanjing. As the name suggests, they are mostly nocturnal. They spend the day roosting in trees.
Well, that’s how they usually spend the day. But this morning the birds at Nyleta Wetlands/Hasties Swamp National Park, on the Atherton Tablelands, Far North Queensland, were making circuits of the lake. A road crew working on drainage channels kept disturbing them at their roost…
