Fantail Hunting Midges

It's been another day home on the range, taking these easy in a bid to get better. My chest isn't quite so tight today; the prednisone and regular ventolin spacers seem to be doing the trick.

Before the light failed, I decided to head out into the garden hoping to get some more bird photos. As I mentioned last week, there's plenty of fantails around the garden at the moment, chasing the sandflies.

This sequence of photos is of one male chasing a bunch of midges. If you go large you may seem some specs in front of the bird - they're not lens dust or oil marks, they're tiny flying insects that the Fantail is hunting.

As you can probably imagine, they're a difficult bird to photograph in flight. In fact any kiwi blipper will tell you they're much easier to photograph on a branch! As such I had to go for a very fast shutter speed and shoot wide open to optimise my autofocus on the camera, which was shooting at 9 frames per second. Luckily, I got a few keepers in sequence!

Thanks to those who also commented on yesterdays 'pre-moon' stars. It seems my star shots are well-loved :-)