Today I was a birder.

Click to enlarge

Well, in a sense I’m always a birder if you count feeding them every day. I even have a best bird buddy in the shape of a fork-tailed drongo that will eat out of my hand and who shouts at me it I’m late with his cheese. After breakfast, he will sometimes serenade me. Not the most melodious bird, but I’m still flattered.

In terms of the avian definition, I’m not a true birder, of course. (I don’t know my canaries from my finches). But I am one in the sense that I love photographing them. Most of the time, I find Google can tell me the name of the bird in my pic and a lot more about it, besides. That’s good enough for me.

So, in this birder guise, I set out for one of our local lakes this morning and took up station at a bird hide. Last time I visited, the site was water and reeds and no birds. Today, some kind soul has planted a number of tree stumps in the water, providing perfect perches for a variety of birds.

I took a number of shots of the bird featured above which both Google and I identified as a white-breasted cormorant. All in all, I took about 40 pictures, of which I finally kept two. That’s the thing about digital photography. You can take as many pics as you like and only keep a few. In the old days, 40 pics was more than a full roll of film and to have to process them for the sake of keeping two was a somewhat expensive pastime.

Something else which attracted my attention at the hide was a school of small fish. The water boiled as

they rushed about in a frantic state of confusion. After a while, I saw the cause of the panic. They were being hunted by two cormorants which had to surface from time to time to swallow their catch and get air. It’s the first time I’ve seen something like this at the lake, so it kind of made my day.

If you’re wondering about the other pic I kept, Google called it a lesser swamp warbler. A friend who knows says it’s a little rush warbler.

I can’t argue but I doubt the little tyke wants to be called “lesser”.