Late Night Birding Rabbit-Hole - Alternate Maori Names for Silvereyes

I was rearranging some files when I came across the pukupuku videos recently, and was reminded of the alternate Maori name for Silvereyes: "Pihipihi"

TBH, I've long disliked the standard one that textbooks often refer to (i.e. "Tauhou", as I've always found it hard to figure out the pronunciation of, and just didn't like the meaning either). Granted... tonight I have managed to narrow it down to sound like "Tau - Hor" (i.e. rhyming with, "Chow Hor" - i.e. fried thick rice noodles, such as "Beef Ho Fun" 😋)

But "Pihipihi" - well that I can certainly pronounce (and the name does have some links back to the sounds they sometimes make - e,g, when they hopping around the undergrowth, making contented vocalisations from all the feasting they're in the midst of... or maybe it's another way of expressing those rapid "fleeing triplet calls" - i.e. "cli cli cli" / "chie chie chie")

In addition, it turns out there are a bunch of *other* names too now that some tribes may have used. In particular, the ones that stood out to me are:
* 1) "Poporohe" - Yeah, that one sounds easy enough to remember + pronounce again
* 2) "Pikariahe" - Slightly less convenient, given the macron on the first i (which I won't be using)

* 3) "Whiorangi" - Given that I now have a code-documentation system named after the "Whio"   (blue-duck), calling them "blue-ducks of the sky" is a tempting idea!

I'll have to do some more research into all of these to double-check what's going on, but don't be surprised if I start adopting these names for various purposes going forwards  (e.g. for a photo editing + management tool being the most likely beneficiary!) 🤓 

Silvereye Season - Rain Day

Yesterday's rain day provided a lot more interesting SIlvereye Photos than I had been bargaining on!

Looking through all the photos, I realised that most of the day, I basically had two visitors (and an occasional mystery third or forth one).

 

As you'll soon seen in the following posts, I ended up naming these two:
1) "Mohawk"
2) "Humperdink"

"Mohawk" was the main one I saw, but it turns out "Humperdink" showed up a bunch of times too. Also, I reckon that actually, both may have been juveniles (or at least Mohawk definitely was!)

Silvereye Season - Super Wednesday

Finally getting around to posting some of Wednesday's silvereye goodness today

Some highlights:
1) Mr and Mrs Harakeke Head

2) Check out this funky shadow cast on its head by the unopened (?) flowerheads

  

3) A different pair that happened to come at the same time but stayed apart. I love how this one looks like it's breaking the fourth wall

 

4) The juvenile - You can only tell from this photo from the slightly "fanned out" wings (i.e. whereas adults usually have those folds tightly packed, juveniles seemingly have some trouble with that, and often fan those out slightly and flutter them, along with their microtonally off-tune 3-note (f'' d#'' e'') repeating calls whenever their parents approach with food)

 

Loads MOAR pics here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/aligorith/albums/72177720330132688

Silvereye Season - Mr + Mrs Harakeke Heads

Well, this happened way earlier in the season than I had been expecting!

A BIG thank you to Mr and Mrs Harakeke Head for giving me the chance to take this shot during their lunch visit (having missed capturing them during their breakfast visit).

(Unfortunately, the image is not quite in focus - or at least not quite in the way that I really wanted, but will take this one for now, as it's better than nothing! Will try again when you next come :P)  

In case you don't know, the last few years, I've been trying to move from "single stationary birdy" into "multiple at once" and/or in motion. So being able to capture what looks like a mating pair (given how they arrived together, and happily feasted from the same flower in close proximity to each other is a relative rare thing)

Silvereye Season - Early Birds

This year the Silvereye Season officially kicked off *way* earlier than usual, with the first flowers opening last Sunday on 26th October!  (Previously, this didn't happen until after 1st November)

The first bird sighting was the next day (though I didn't get any footage of that, given it was a fleeting visit behind net curtains, with no camera on hand, and a phone that couldn't focus in time).

In the days that followed, were the first photo of one (through the net curtains) on the morning of the 29th:

 

Fast forward to this morning, when I finally got my first "proper" shots - of a "Harakeke Head" no doubt:

Silvereye Season 24 + Different Types of Silvereye Calls

Every year, November marks "Silvereye Season" - the month where the bottlebrush outside my window blooms, and the silvereyes come jauntily swooping in to feast on the nectar, pulling all manner of cute and adorable acrobatics. Sadly, this year's season has been heavily interrupted + restricted by a series of home renovations we've been doing that just happened to need to coincide with this month... *sigh*

 

As a result, this year, I've been limited to only getting a literal handful of very short shooting windows this year, and an even smaller number of OK photos, of which the ones above are probably the sum total...

(There were also a bunch of early ones where I managed to capture 2-3 staging a surprise visit just when I got home... but those aren't that great quality due to only having a short zoom + wrong camera settings on an afternoon with very average lighting, so I won't be posting those online)

You may also notice that the colours are a bit punchier than usual, as I've also been forced to trial a new photo processing pipeline (i.e. Darktable) as noted in a previous post.

Juvenile Silvereyes

Wheee! This afternoon, I came home to the sound of juvenile silvereyes excitedly crying for food. I rushed inside, mounted the bird lens, and looked up at the tree armed with some proper gear. I'm glad I did, as it turns out there were 3 of them in an adorable huddle, and not just the single fat one I thought I'd seen earlier!  😊

Cross posted for archival purposes from Mastodon

Silvereye Season Highlights 2019

Every November, the Silvereyes come to visit the bottlebrush right outside my window, putting on a show of daring acrobatics, cheerful chirping, and occasional clumsy antics. For the past decade, it's been one of the photographic highlights of the year for me (and a big reason why I got into photography in the first place).

Good Morning!

While this year, I couldn't spend the whole day plonked in front of the window keeping an eye of them, I was lucky that the times I was around (e.g. early morning, before rushing out the door to get to work, and when unwinding after a long day at work) turned out to be the times when some of the most interesting lighting/activities happened anyway ;)

Silvereye vs Berry - Slowmo & Regular Speed

Yesterday evening, I caught a plump little silvereye blissfully feasting away on a tasty little yellow berry out the back of the house. Amazingly, I managed to stand there for a few minutes snapping away and recording footage through the gap between the window and the windowframe; it may have helped that the toilet was gurgling away nearby to drown out the clap-clap-clap-clap-clap of the shutter XD (hence why I've replaced the original audio with some more snippets of music from my thesis writing collections).

Here is the footage of the birdie in action. First up is the slowed down version (from 25 fps down to 5 fps):

It's comical watching the birdy chomping, twisting, and tugging away like this.

It's also surprising just how relaxed/serene it all looks when slowed down like this (something I've noticed when stepping through the footage of some earlier clips too) - it's almost like we're finally seeing the world at the speed that the birds actually live/experience it! And to think that I only really noticed this after watching the full-speed clip render out at about this speed and realising just how much more interesting it was to watch when played back this slowly... :D


Now, if you're wondering what it actually looks like at full speed, here's the full-speed version:

It looks a whole lot more frantic eh? (And, just to be clear, I didn't speed up the video... they really do move that quickly in real life!)


As always, these were edited in the Blender Sequencer - I still have the same complaints about ugly quirks in the workflow though :(

(Note to self: I must really get cracking on either adding per-strip blendin/out + better font/text support to the sequencer, OR just bite the bullet and put together my own FFMPEG-based "VIM x Node-Tree" video/audio editor project. If it wasn't for the overhead of setting up a new app structure from scratch and then maintaining it, I get the feeling that the latter would almost invariably end up being a better solution in the long run for my particular needs/workflow)

Happy 16/06/16

Just a little bit of fun birdie art for a special date, featuring none other than one of my favourite little silvereyes :)

Painted using Krita

Silvereye Season Roundup

On a happier note, here are some of the highlights from this year's silvereye season. This year, there seemed to be fewer birds around (I counted something like only 2-3 distinct birds, two of whom started coming as a pair later in the season).

Silvereye Season

After some delays due to the rain storms we've been having over the past two days, today marks the start of the silvereye season for 2015!

 The first silvereye shot for the season!

This afternoon, several silvereyes dropped by for a snack on the bottlebrush flowers outside my window that opened on Tuesday. A silvereye had dropped by early on Monday afternoon, checking out my tree and a few of the flower heads, despite there not being any obvious flowers at the time; but, since the flowers weren't open yet then, the season only started today :)

Naughty Cat Stalking Silvereye Chicks

As much as I like looking at pics of cute/fluffy/beautiful cats on the internet, it's sickening seeing them do *this*! Especially when, just days earlier, the silvereyes were busily feeding a nest of chicks in that very part of the tree!

Perhaps the only consolation is that the AFAIK, the silvereye nest in question has been empty since the weekend, when some strong winds came through and probably damaged it. I hope the babies were ok - that is, I hope they were old enough to have tried flying away, as their nest became uninhabitable. Either that, or today was our furball's greedy return visit for "seconds"...

Birthday Silvereyes

I've been having a great time over the past few days (snow + great food + fun coding!), despite a few minor hiccups (an early morning start to tutor 2 labs yesterday, and a burst tire the day before). However, what really made my day yesterday was when the lovely silvereyes treated me to a special display of fluff-ball cuteness.

Winter Visitors - Late Afternoon Silvereye Feeding

This afternoon, I had some lovely visitors...

Aww... Isn't that one cute plump silvereye :)   Given that it's mid-winter here, with temperatures in the single digits (and often feeling a lot chillier) in the late afternoons, it's no wonder that they need to fluff up quite a bit to keep warm!

RIP - The Fallen Silvereye

Sometimes, nature can be quite savage and cruel, reminding us all just how fragile life really is. Just over an hour ago, I watched in horror as a silvereye fell out of the tree and onto the cold hard concrete less than a metre away from where I stood. Out of nowhere, there was a rustling of leaves overhead, and then all of a sudden, there was a chaotic ball green-grey wings and feathers flailing around on the ground, frantically tossing and turning (in what I presume was shock) before rolling onto its back, legs twitching, and taking its last gasps of air.

Mid Afternoon Sketches - Birdies

Some mid-afternoon doodles from earlier today - all with black ballpoint pen..

 Chiieee!

The silvereyes do sometimes get into a bit of a flap over a preferred perch...

A little warmup sketch

Silvereyes - On the Small Strawberry Dogwood Tree

This month, the fruit on the Strawberry Dogwood trees we've got growing in our garden finally ripened, attracting the silvereyes back to our garden again after several months away. Notice I said trees (in the plural). In previous years, we only had the big one beside the driveway. This year, one of that tree's descendents finally started producing fruit too, after growing in an old recycling bin for the past 3-5 years! Seeing as this young tree is a lot more mobile, we moved it closer to the house/windows at the start of the month, and began to wait. Today, the waiting was over!

Silvereyes - Low Key

Here are some shots of the silvereyes from a particularly good day last week, taken just before a hail storm passed through. There are quite a few shots here I'm quite happy with :)

Silvereyes Bonanza - An Afternoon Feast

This afternoon, I had an absolute blast capturing a bunch of shots I'm quite pleased with. It was slightly overcast, a "conveniently located" branch of the bottlebrush was starting to go into full bloom, and I still had my camera in 8fps AF drive from yesterday's bread-feeding frenzy...

These are just some of favourites from the set.. More are included down below