Silvereye Season

November is one of my favourite months of each year, as that's when the bottlebrush outside my window flowers, attracting the silvereyes within close range to feast. In past years, it's usually at least the second week (or after the 10th) before the bottlebrush really starts to flower. But this year, it's some 2-3 weeks early, and is currently in full bloom!

So far, I've seen at least 3-4 different birds coming in this year. So far, it seems that one of them has an orange patch on its head, and there's a pair of them which often come together.

This year, they seem quite tame, and in general don't seem quite so scared about my presence as they happily feast on for several minutes even while I'm following them intently with a telephoto lens pointed straight at them and clicking away noisily (having a convenient clump of flowers which stick up above the rest but still within close camera range helps too :)

On some days though, they've been a bit sneaky: it's like they have a sixth sense which lets them know if I'm sitting at my desk or not. For example, I once caught a flock having a free-for-all one day after having wandered off for just 5 minutes! They didn't even make a single noise as they happily dined!

(Side Note: I'm currently still in the process of adjusting my photography workflow on Linux. Apart from adapting to some new software/hardware support issues, I'm still struggling a bit with monitor calibration on this laptop. In its default configuration, yellows and blues have some rather sickly casts, which have been somewhat tricky to entirely correct).