Morning visitors

On Bruny Island, we were visited this morning by a pair of Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos, who fed noisily in a Banksia tree growing alongside our rented cottage. We rarely see these attractive large birds in Lennox Head, though they are fairly common throughout eastern Australia. In this photo, the male is the bird on the left with red eye ring and raised crest.

Wikipedia has an informative webpage, including speculation the Tasmanian birds might be declared a separate sub-species from those on the mainland.

I don’t usually post a blip as early in the day as this but it’s drizzling with rain outside and there may not be many photographs taken today. Also, I’m quite pleased with this shot, which was taken on an iPhone in poor light and cropped like crazy.

If the weather improves I might add an extra later in the day.

Twelve hours later: Despite the drizzle, I walked around the shore of Adventure Bay on the south-east coast of Bruny Island (see extra). The bay was named in 1793 by Tobias Furneaux RN, captain of HMS Adventure. He was accompanying Captain Cook, in command of HMS Resolution, on Cook’s second voyage to the Pacific. Furneaux named this northern corner of the bay Quiet Corner and commented on a lagoon, maybe this one, where his crew caught fish. But he was not the first European navigator to visit. The Dutchman, Abel Tasman, had been here131 years earlier.