Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Birds of Pulau Burung Part 2

While at Pulau Burung I had the opportunity to observe and photograph the Yellow Bittern hunting for food.This particular bird would walk slowly along the reed’s edge and stopped immediately whenever it’s prey is located. It will remain motionless for sometime and wait for the prey, usually tadpole, small fish and crustaceans to come within striking distance before executing the ‘lightning’ quick strike.

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Eyes fixed on prey, ready to strike…

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Fire!….. notice how long the neck stretched out in order for it to reach the prey.

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The unlucky tadpole is now part of the bird’s breakfast!

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Another commonly seen bird at the pond is the Black-Winged Stilt. Appropriately named ‘stilt’, the extra long legs made them look rather unusual – the Giraffe of the Bird world….

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The extra long legs surely served them well in their environment…

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They may look a little awkward to us whenever they need to reach down to ground level…

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Further up the pond I spotted this Little Egret foraging for food. It has a very interesting method to catch it’s prey. I observed that the bird will occasionally stop at any puddle found and used the foot to stir before picking out it’s prey that showed up.

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Walk, stop at water puddle and stir with the foot..

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Pick the prey that showed up in the disturbed puddle…

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5 comments:

  1. Nice! When was this taken, it does help
    when posting and publishing bird photos
    to give at least an approximate date.
    Thanks.
    Choo Eng.

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  2. Thanks for the reminder Choo Eng, I must have overlooked the date, actually I prepared the post as one document and later decided to split it into 2 parts, this could've caused me to overlook the date as I've already had the date shown at the top of my Part 1 postings.

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  3. Brilliant shots Ari. If your Yellow Bitterns are like the bittern family in Europe, thay re very secretive and hard to photograph so full marks for those. As you so rightly point out, the stilt pictures really capture the length of their legs in your low level pictures. A few familiar species there for me!

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  4. Jaw breaking images! The bittern is very nice! And your images of the Stilt are awseome!

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