And while I was waiting…a Kookaburra nest
November 2006
When you spend a lot of time idly hanging around waiting for a certain bird to show up, you can’t help but notice all the other bird activity going on around you.
While waiting for the cassowary over the past few days I got pretty bored being in one spot for hours. My book of Wordoku puzzles soon lost its grip on my attention. Luckily, since I wasn’t in a blind, it was easy to watch the other species coming and going. Flocks of chattering Metallic Starlings would suddenly swarm into a tree above my head to feast on the berries before swirling off once more. The local pair of Orange-footed Scrubfowl announced their presence nearby with raucous chortling calls. Most delightful of all, a tiny male Yellow-breasted Sunbird took a long bath in some water droplets on a large leaf.
The most obvious neighbors, though, were two Laughing Kookaburras, that I heard calling nearby many times. It took me a while to realize there was a pattern to their calls and movements. One used a regular perch from which it called as it flew, always in the same direction, before falling silent. I decided to watch where it went. To my surprise it flew to a vine covered tree trunk and disappeared. Bells rang in my head! A nest?
I moved closer, and discovered a termite nest (or termitary) with a large hole in the front in the fork of the tree. Termitaries provide nest sites for many kingfishers and their relatives, the Kookaburras, as well as parrots and their kin. Australia has no woodpeckers to provide ready-made homes for these hole-nesters.
So next afternoon after the light had softened a bit from its tropical glare, I waited at the Kookaburra nest. From the activity it seemed that the female was incubating, since I hadn’t noticed any food being taken into the nest. I waited until I saw the female come out (as she did regularly to defecate and preen), then moved into place. I used a 500mm lens with a 1.4X teleconverter so I could be a distance from the nest, so as to not dissuade the female from returning. Although the Kookaburra had seen me and other people wandering around nearby, she became more wary when she noticed that my attention was on her nest. Even though I kept very still she seemed shy, so I moved even farther away. Finally, she flew to the nest and shuffled in without turning around. Too bad, because I would have liked the photo to be of her sitting outside the nest. Incubating hole-nesting birds, though, often zip into their nests quickly, presumably to avoid detection.
Instead I had to wait with my eye glued to the viewfinder for half an hour or so before she took her next break. I could see her eye and bill inside the cavity, so as soon as she began to move I started firing shots. She hesitated briefly, and that was my one chance before the light faded.