Refusing to Be...

"We have always found the Irish a bit odd. They refuse to be English."

- Winston Churchill

And I find this Barn Swallow a bit odd: it refuses to be a Welcome Swallow. ;-) Looking at my bird book (Simpsons & Day's Field Guide to the Birds of Australia), the Welcome Swallow lives in much of Australia, whereas the Barn Swallow is an annual migrant - in small numbers - to the top bits of the country. These two species look almost identical, it seems, save for a slightly smoother-looking abdomen in the Barn Swallow, and more particularly, a black band around the throat. Now, I guess it's possible I'm just seeing shadow around this little one's throat, but it looks to me like more than that.

Making it a Barn Swallow.

Even though it shouldn't be.

Unprocessed version here. I cropped to 2:3, and enlarged a bit (I had taken it in landscape), sharpened, added a duplicate layer set to "overlay" with about 70-80% opacity, then edited the layer mask so it applied to only the swallow.

Large version here.