Rescued from the archive

I've spent a lot of time of late in the house processing images from years past rather than getting out birding and taking new photographs. The two images here bring back pleasant memories of warmer times on the Kona coast, Hawaii in January 2009; bristle-thighed curlew above, and pacific golden plover below. The images selected were on a dvd of processed TIFFs (I keep the RAW files seperate) - and during the process of todays' review I managed to corrupt the dvd - luckily the images were salvage using a sandisk rescue program...

PS - click the images to see the larger size / sharp image... the blogger program has a habit of making the images look soft!

Bristle-thighed Curlew

Bird of the trip for me, this bristle-thighed curlew was delightfully confiding. I found this bird on an afternoon shore-line walk... and admit that my language was a little blue as I scrambled to attach a tele converter to the 500mm lens prior to getting my first record photographs. As it turned out no tele convertor was needed - this bird was fearless and would frequently walk past at an un-focusable distance. I was fortunate enough to have several sessions with this bird.

This bird was very entertaining to watch feeding - chasing crabs around rock pools (literally), then bashing them on rocks to enable swallow-able chunks to be devoured!

Bristle-thighed curlew breed locally in the tundra of west Alaska and winters among Pacific islands, it is more common in the north-west Hawaiian islands but is considered rare on the main Hawaiian islands. It's unique among waders as it is flightless during moult - perhaps a reason why there are only approximatley 7,000 left...