Anyway, I intend to keep updating this list if I can come up with better versions of each photo, but this will depend on how long my enthusiasm lasts. Could be a day, could be a week...
PS. Clicking on a picture will show the image in a slightly larger size.













When I approach them on foot, these birds fly away before I can get close enough for a photo. But today I was driving along beside the road on a very noisy ride-on mower while 3 birds were walking on the road (there's not much traffic to worry about) and they weren't perturbed at all. I was only a few metres away from this one, and it just stood and watched me for a while, then wandered off. Very strange.

When I was at primary school, we called these birds Squeakers. I don't know whether it's a name that was used more widely or only in our school, but regardless, it was appropriate. They do sound squeaky at times (they're not called Noisy for nothing).



















** I'm using a Konica Minolta DiMage X31 which - for a fully automatic basic camera - is a thing of wonder, but its lens isn't designed for doing long-range closeups. So I'm shooting at a high image-quality setting (2048 x 1536 pixels) and then trimming the pictures back to 400 x 300 pixels using Adobe PhotoDeluxe (Home Edition v.3; it's pretty old now). In its "Save & Send: To World Wide Web" section, the Adobe allows you to trim, then check the size, then retrim, recheck the size... on and on for as long as you like, something that's not available in the camera's editing software.
Anyway, here's what it looks like:
(1) the original shot, not trimmed (resized here to 400 x 300 pixels)

(2) the same shot, trimmed to 400 x 300

It looks black because the exposure is hopeless, but in fact this bird is mostly white. It was hovering over the hillside like this, looking at the ground, then flying a bit further forward and hovering again.