Intruder!

And what a miserable day it's been. Constant, heavy showers of rain (a good thing) and not easy to get a blip (a bad thing).

In between the showers I kept putting the feeder out, only to bring it back in again after a few moments. On one of these forays, I spotted a kookaburra in the tree next door. We hear them constantly but don't see them all that often.

But they are very good at just sitting there so I had time to get the camera and try a few different settings. We are using the Rower's 70-200 lens at the moment with the two times extender. We're not happy with the results, it adds a huge amount of noise, and the images are simply not as sharp as they should be. Plus it's hellishly heavy and very unwieldy.

However, you can get closer than with my 300 mm lens, so we are putting up with what we have to put up with for the moment.

Anyway back to the kookaburra. All the birds that visit us are fairly territorial, and the ravens seem to be really under siege at the moment. I've seen serious warfare between them and the magpies, they seem to really resent the currawongs, and now today, I saw one trying to see off this innocent little kookaburra.

The problem is that they are all meat eaters, and I don't put out a whole lot - there is a limit on what I am prepared to spend feeding birds, much as I love them.

The battle ended with them both flying off - and I don't think there was a lot of love lost between them.

Thanks so much for all your lovely comments on last night's blip of me and my brother. I've had a mad afternoon cooking up a storm, but hopefully will get back to comments tonight.