This week, we’re back to the Birds folder and still in Florida – the date stamp somehow got eradicated from the file but from the image number I’m fairly certain this is the same day as the first from this category. Not long after moving to Florida, I idly watched a flock of birds pass overhead and thought little of it – I don’t follow songbirds all that much, and anyway these looked like mourning doves in profile and flight pattern. But just as they almost disappeared from sight, one of them gave forth with a recognizable set of squawks, and there’s really no other word for it. It was a raucous sound, vaguely reminiscent of a crow but shorter and more repetitive. And since I’d had a couple of conures for several years, I knew the sound instantly. Florida is somehow home to more escaped and feral species than one can imagine; it hosts at least seventy species of parrot, none of them native. But thus began my quest to capture some of these on film, which wasn’t proving easy, since they tended to perch high and be wary of strangers, no matter how many crackers were in evidence (the foodstuff, not the- oh, never mind.)
So when a pair landed not too far away in a twisted tree, I stalked them slowly, and managed a handful of photos close enough to permit identification: these are blue-crowned conures (Thectocercus acuticaudatus,) natives of South America but quite popular in the pet trade. Both of these photos are cropped quite a bit tighter than the original frames, since the birds still remained a safe distance away and there was only so far the lens on the Sony F717 was going to reach.
Most birds are pretty aggressive within the flock, taking shots at one another over perching spots and all that, but with the Psitticines, it looks much more impressive as those wicked beaks come into play. And in fact, this reminds me of two stories that I’m going to have to relate in an Odd Memories post pretty soon. Meanwhile, I’ll let you speculate as to whether the image below illustrates an antiperspirant check or not…
