Birds of a Feather
I was quite pleased to see that today’s prompt was about birds as I already had a draft on the subject. So here, as they say, is one I prepared earlier.
I’ve often mentioned how much I enjoy the birds that visit my garden. I think that I’m quite lucky that as I live in the country we get a wide variety of birds although not all of them visit me. Some prefer the tall gum trees of adjacent properties and some I spot just flying past. I am always trying to photograph them but rarely succeed. Here are a few of my attempts.
Of the garden visitors of course the most common are the sparrows, starlings, swallows and honeyeaters. I have a soft spot for sparrows although some consider them vermin.
Less common visitors are the blue wrens and robins who only seem to be around in winter time. I have seen Zebra Finches too but I haven’t managed to photograph any of these small birds successfully. I have also had occasional visits from a pair of Green Rosella’s and once a flock of ducks but they had escaped from a neighbour’s garden so I can’t really count them I suppose.
The plover family dynasty has adopted the plot of land adjoining my driveway and I often see them looking for food there or flying around shrieking. They are quite vocal birds.
In the neighbourhood category the crows are the ones I hear most often. Their distinctive “Caw, caw” call is easy to pick. Surprisingly I don’t see or hear magpies nearby but we do have kookaburras. They prefer the taller gum trees or perhaps a power pole to perch on. I also hear seagulls as it is not far to Port Huon where there are plenty of fish and sometimes flocks of noisy Sulphur Crested Cockatoos. Sometimes I’ll even see an eagle flying overhead. They are too far away for me to say what kind they are.
The ones that got away.
http://www.birdlife.org.au/bird-profile/scarlet-robin
http://www.birdlife.org.au/bird-profile/superb-fairy-wren
http://www.birdlife.org.au/bird-profile/zebra-finch
http://birdlife.org.au/bird-profile/laughing-kookaburra
Our Other Blog: Two Sisters and Two Points of View 
You must live in paradise with such beautiful birds abundant!
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Well I live in the country and my cat lives mostly indoors so the birds are not afraid to stop by. We do have beautiful parrots in Australia and I love the elusive robins and wrens. I hope to get a good shot of them one day.
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I’ve seen many bloggers from around the world posting images of common sparrow, and they all look the same. I’ve read they are an invasive species. For example in the USA, they’ve not always been there.
Apart from that, in Australia you have a lot more colorful and interesting birds. Ours are usually greyish, black, white… with exceptions. But here I noticed, the more colorful, the more difficult they are to find. It happened so often that I went into the nature trying to take photos of birds, but I went home with sparrow photos again 😀 But well, I like them anyway!
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I guess that is why they are called common sparrows. 🙂 I am not sure where they originally came from.
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Yeah sure but other birds change depending on the habitat, but maybe it’s all about time. They just got introduced to other places more recently (200 years), that’s probably not a lot of time in terms of nature, when it comes to changed in appearance. That’s probably why they look the same.
Their native habitat is Eurasia. They got introduced to Australia, South Africa , North- and Southamerica. Here you can see:
Dark green is the native habitat. Light green the introduced habitat.
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Wow, what’s that? The Wikipedia image got immedietly shown. Is this a new feature of WordPress? How cool is that? Or did you find any settings that make it possible to show images in comments?
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No I never saw that happen before either. If it is a new WordPress feature I am impressed.
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I tested this on my blog, it seems to work there too. This must be a new feature then, or I never noticed this lol 🙂
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I just got a notification this morning that WordPress are trying another new editor called Gutenberg. Have you seen anything about this. I read the FAQ but it got a bit too techy for me.
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Not yet. Did they write an article about it? I didn’t get an email.
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Dennis it came up on my Dashboard as an announcement but it is not there today so I did a search and there are a few posts about it. It sounds as if they intend this will be the default editor eventually.
Here is one post on the subject.
https://perfectchaos.org/2018/03/20/changes-are-coming-to-wordpress/
I also found this video but it is about an hour long and to be honest the man’s voice is very soft and the presentation is a bit boring. You will probably make more sense of it though. I tend to prefer written instructions that I can go back over to video presentations.
https://automattic.design/2018/04/13/fresh-look-into-gutenberg-for-wordpress-a-usability-walkthrough/
The thrust of it seems to be that posts are all composed in “blocks” As I was perfectly happy with the way I was doing things in the old editor not the newer beep bop editor I am not sure that I will be a fan.
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I am not even half through the video and see already that this new editor awful. One can just hope that they won’t phase out the classic editor entirely, because if they do, our re-direct scripts won’t help anymore either.
I thought beep-beep editor was the worst someone could come up with, but Gutenberg looks like it can get worse. I get claustrophobia when I look at the text area. Also it looks like a drag-and-drop experience… awful. I am afraid to test this myself (laugh).
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I know me too, the article I emailed you described it as being about the touch experience so those of us who prefer to write on a desktop or laptop are going to find it difficult. They say they will leave the old editor for a while but they probably won’t leave it forever. Whenever something gets called “classic” you can be sure it’s days are numbered.
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