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| I saw that Papuan Pitta! This is David Adam's gorgeous photo of it. They are that beautiful. |
I knew the bird was around and I was extremely keen to start looking for it. After all, it was my main target of the trip. James and I were out and walking down the track by our house before Clint and David. They both wanted to get photos and in the dim ‘rainforest jungle’, light in the early morning is scarce.
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| A portion of the track into our house. |
Then James and I heard the bird. It has a very distinctive call and call they do. That does not mean that you will see it.
It seemed that the pitta was close-ish to the track and we found a place where we could move in a bit to look. The plan was to sit quietly on a camp stool (I had bought an inexpensive tripod stool for this trip). I placed the stool on the ground quietly and carefully. James was squatting off to my side (he is young and good at squatting, I am neither of those things). As I lowered my weight onto the stool, the back leg sunk straight into the wet earth and I fell over backwards landing like a turtle on its back. Thank God James was there to help me get back up. I was in a very awkward position on the ground holding my camera out of the wet. Thank you once again, James. At least my damn phone was in my waterproof bum-bag, no worries there.
However, all of the commotion that I had made falling over and James helping me up, had spooked the pitta. Now it was calling from much farther away. So we headed down the track a bit. We came to a small path in and again, we could hear the pitta calling. By now, David and Clint had come down too. They moved into an area to the right side of James and me. The bird sounded like it was calling somewhere between us and them, but closer to them. We went back out and came in closer to where they were. We could really hear the bird. We went closer and then we saw them.
I have written before about birders being able to ‘bird’ other birders. By that I mean, being able to tell what is going on by interpreting body language. As soon as we saw them, we knew that they had seen, or were seeing, the pitta. I approached slowly and quietly from behind. And then, out in front of them in a very small 'open' area, I had quick, clear, beautiful views of a Papuan Pitta. It sort-of bounced across the leaf litter and disappeared to our right. I had beheld my target bird. I had it. Joy. Massive joy!
The pitta moved around to further to our right, between us and the track. It crossed a log. It was in constant motion. I had several more glimpses as it moved. I managed a few recording shots and as poor as they are, I will include them here. I was over-the-moon just having seen this gorgeous, gloriously colourful visitor from New Guinea. Here are some photos including one from James. His camera is only 5 or 6 years old and its ISO can be set as high as 16,000.
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| James' shot of that first Papuan Pitta. The others are mine. |
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| Going and... |
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| gone |
I will now break with the chronological order and leap ahead from Tuesday 10 January, to Saturday 14 January and the second time I beheld the Papuan Pitta. Following this post, I will return to 10 January and move more chronologically through these tales. There is much that I want to share!
Okay, back to the pitta. My dear friend, David Mead had told us about a spot where he was hearing the pitta out on Portland Road not far from the triangle three-way turn. We headed out there Saturday morning and we heard the bird. We made our way into the rainforest toward the calls. The four of us positioned ourselves looking toward an area with a small amount of visibility through the undergrowth as well as some logs on the ground.
Now. Trying to have four birders sit still very quietly and can be a challenge. I have no complaints about my companions on this trip. I would bird with them all again at any time. We sat there, ‘mostly’ still and quiet and waited. We could hear the Pitta calling closer. And then we all saw it. Joy. What a fabulous bird.
James and my views were mostly from the side and through a lot of undergrowth. Low light and many small trees and sticks were making my auto-focus lose its mind. David and Clint got a little bit better views as it moved around more in front of their positions. The beautiful photo of this bird that I featured at the opening of the post was generously shared with me by David Adam. He is truly an excellent photographer as well as being an excellent birder. That is sometimes a difficult combination to achieve and he does it very well. Often one or the other will suffer. The cover shot of the Opalton Grasswren on my last book is his. I had been standing beside him as we both photographed the same Opalton Grasswren on the same rock. His photo was crisp and perfect, mine was good but not enough to be a cover photo.
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| James' recording shot of the second Papuan Pitta. He had the same angle on it that I did. |
Yes indeed, on this trip I finally accepted that my old Canon 7D 100-400mm is truly out of date. It is fourteen years old. Shooting in that low light, my ISO could not go any higher than 6,400 and that wasn’t enough. In most of these shots, my shutter speed was 1/20 or less. I was not able to get any clear images of the pitta. BUT please make no mistake, I am deeply grateful for the views I got and the recording shots that I managed to take. I have said repeatedly and will continue to say, I am not a bird photographer. I am a writer who also takes pictures. Sometimes they are good, sometimes, not so much.
This past week, I did go a camera store here and I have finally entered the ‘low end’ of this new mirrorless technology. Things have come a long way in fourteen years. I have a Canon R7 body now as well as the affordable 100-400mm (my old lens won’t work with the new cameras) . Haha, I reckon I am sticking with ‘sevens.’ My last “7” certainly served me amazingly well. I still have it and I will keep it, and sometimes I will use it too.
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| I do not know how to use it yet, but I have entered the world of mirrorless photography. |
Back to Saturday, 14 January and a surprise visit from a Southern Cassowary.
After the Papuan Pitta had ‘left the building’ we went up the road to Rainforest Campground in hopes of a Northern Scrub-robin. It would be a Lifer for Clint. We walked a few score metres into the jungle and looked around. It was calling and some of us saw it (I saw my Lifer in 2015 in the same area). It was not being very confiding and we wandered back out. Clint decided to go back in to try and get a photo of the bird. The rest of us were hanging around our vehicle when I spotted a Southern Cassowary between us and the area where Clint was trying photograph the Scrub-robin. We did not want him to miss out on this bird. They are very rarely seen in Kutini-Payamu NP. So I yelled in, “Clint, there’s a cassowary near you!”
This was Clint’s first visit up there and he had never seen a Cassowary in the wild. However he had heard the stories of how dangerous they can be. He saw it and started back toward us and it followed him. It was a younger bird and I reckon it was just curious, but Clint was a little concerned. James called out to him not to run. Later Clint said that he wished someone had taken a video of him slowly, but deliberately walking out of the forest with the Cassowary following along close behind him. He did not run, but the look on his face was priceless. The bird walked around us and then wandered off again. I am sure Clint will always remember his Lifer Southern Cassowary.
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| James, me and Clint by our vehicle shortly after the Cassowary encounter. This was just down the road at Cooks Hut Campground, David Adam took this photo of us. |
I will make that the end of this second blog entry. Now I am thinking that there will be four entries. We will see.
Sending love as I do ❤️
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