Friendly Fantail

"Birds are the last of the dinosaurs. Tiny velociraptors with wings. Devouring defenseless wiggly things and, and nuts, and fish, and, and other birds. They get the early worms. And have you ever watched a chicken eat? They may look innocent, but birds are, well, they're vicious."

- Neil Gaiman (Anansi Boys)

I'm at home today with a bit of a lurgi. When I went to take the compost down to the bin I saw this wee fantail flitting about on the fence nearby. I stood and watched for a while, and atone point it flitted right over to me - just a few inches away - and back to the fence.

After a while I went back inside and returned with my camera on the off-chance it hadn't disappeared - and it was still there. I managed to get really quite close to the beautiful little thing, with the camera on burst, and took many many shots. After going through them, and weeding out near-duplicates and blurred shots of grass, trees, and fence ;-) I decided to go with this one, as the other ones I really liked of the bird had some rather ugly bokeh in the background - which was unfortunately distracting. This has a much better background.

I felt really privileged to have this tiny little flying dinosaur flitting about so unfussedly, so close to me. 8)

In case you want to know, it's a Grey Fantail (Rhipidura albiscapa) - race alisteri, as far as I can tell.

Taken with my Lumix G10, cropped in Photogene on my iPad, and uploaded with the blipfoto iPhone app, (hence the stripped out/ignored exif data).