Young Kookaburra

I've had a bunch of Kookaburras move in to the area lately, this one looks like its recently out of the nest

a higher magnification crop of the above gives a clearer picture of the feathers and the soft downy feathers on the chest and still in the head.

I like these guys ... great entertainment (especially when they're robbing food from unaware city people or tourists...)

I've warned you before...

Hey, you!

I've told you before, if I see you here again I'm going to give you a thrashing

Right!

Now to make it clear, I'm going to shit all over this motorbike so you know who's place this is...

territory intruder

I've had problems with Wrens being ... well bird brained about things before (here). But now that I'm living more or less in Wren Country its becoming more common.

Sitting at the table this afternoon I was conscious that the Wren "territory calling" sound was becoming a bit more acute ... so I looked out the window and sure enough, this Wren had found another rambunctious intruder ...

It alternatively attacked the other bird and sat calling for the rest of the tribe (Wrens are group birds with one dominant male) to assist with driving this intruder off ...

The regular "shopping bag over the mirror trick" seemed to work ... and I have enough bird guano on the bike to start a company selling it..

processing the bird

I was out in the back yard today and there was this crested pigeon sitting on a branch, so I happened to be holing my GH1 and the FD300mm f4 (because the bird I was actually wanting to photograph flew away as soon as I tuned my camera on), and thought well ... lets photograph you.

So I came inside, pulled the SD card and moved the RAW file onto my phone and processed it with Snapseed. Here is a scaled version of that

This made me think ... hmmm ... I wonder what I'd have got with a PC based editor ... so I had a quick whirl in a photoshop alike product called RawTherapee

so its not ball tearing difference is it. In fact I kinda like what I could do with Snapseed and (drum roll) it took less time!

Lets zoom in

Snapseed:

RawTherapee:

Not that this is the first  time to really see this or present it, but it is at least entirely different subject matter and shows that Snapseed stacks up across a variety of uses.

Like this guy...

curlews

These guys (curlew) are nocturnal, but seem to "get ready" to come out in the early evening.

where they just "chill" and pretend that if they don't move you can't see them

but of course we can't tell them they're wrong ;-)