Hi Baz,
Some really love shots there!
However, the subject of the second image, the Yellow Breasted Robin, gave me
reason to chuckle.
We neighbour the National Park here and for about the last 6 months a particular
Yellow Breasted Robin has been depriving us of sleep.
The moment the sun rises, he flies up to one of the back windows, hovers like
a hummingbird and starts to incessantly tap, tap, tap at it. After a while you become
conscious that someone must be knocking, only to awake to find it is the Robin.
I tried sticking a picture of a Powerful Owl in the back window, as a deterrent, but it did
not work. Every morning he would come back and tap, tap, tap.
If you wake up and go to the back window, he will cling to the window frame and
stare right back at you at point-blank range. No need for a zoom lens.
If you shoo him away, he flies to a nearby branch, looks back at you in a
cheeky, challenging way and then returns to the window and starts the tapping
again as soon as you walk away.
I conjectured that he must see his own reflection as a rival and so he thinks he
is jousting with another Robin. To deter him, I placed a sheet of plastic over the
outside of the window and that worked. But then I was stuck with this piece of plastic
on the window. After leaving the plastic in place for several weeks, I was
confident that his habit would be broken, plus I had grown tired of not being to
look out the window because it had a piece of plastic over it. So one day I
removed the plastic, but sure enough he returned at sunrise the very following
morning.
On the weekend, I went and purchased a mirror and have hung it from a nearby
branch in the hope he would focus his attention on it instead. But alas, this morning,
despite having a shiny new mirror to do battle with, he chose to awake me again
by tapping on my window.
