My Dad is a very keen birdwatcher. By very keen, I mean that he has well over 5000 pictures of birds that he's taken and loaded onto his computer, and has been known to abandon cups of tea, chocolate biscuits, even entire bowls of dessert in order to leap for his camera and capture some rare feathered example. There was one moment, building the outdoor kitchen block, in which he almost made a leap from the top of a ladder because he forgot he couldn't just grab his camera from there. I think he's made it his mission in life, lately, to single-handedly undertake a survey of the local bird populations around our property.
This particular bird (you may have to zoom in above to see that I've taken a photo of him taking a photo of a bird in flight) had been hovering just outside the range of his lens for a few weeks. Apparently this was most frustrating, as it prevented him identifying whether it was a Nankeen Kestral or a Black-Shouldered Kite.
Luckily, a day or so later it seemed to have gotten used to him enough that when he approached the tree it was perched in it just looked disdainfully in another direction rather than acknowledge Dad's presence by actually flying off.
Which is how we know that we have a small family of Black-Shouldered Kites in the area, in addition to the vast numbers of crows, cockotoos, galahs, wrens, some kind of swallow relative we've yet to identify, and the occasional Wedge-Tailed Eagle.
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