In the gardens with the red-nosed hooter-tooters

Last Monday I met up with Kirsty Hall. You can read about it on Kirsty’s blog and also see the wonderful totemic photographs that she took with a tiny tiny camera. I’m not sure how I found Kirsty’s blog, but I think it was on a list of ‘10 best art blogs’. Kirsty lives in Britain, but she was coming to Sydney. We wanted to meet up, but we both felt like a quiet day (if you look at her blog you’ll see why she needed one) so we had a walk around the Botanical Gardens.

I’d been there the previous week, when I did these drawings. This time I took bread and biscuits to attract the birds & hopefully keep them still enough to draw. In fact we didn’t draw. Mostly I fed the birds and Kirsty photographed them.

We fed ibis first, and tried to feed the red-nosed hooter-tooters, but they were timid and there were less of them about. They are dusky moorhen and the ‘nose’ is a bright red face-plate. Kirsty has heard their call now & also calls them hooter-tooters. After a cuppa tea outside the cafe (birds) we walked throught the palm garden where there were a squillion fruit bats hanging from the trees. (They are trying to relocate them, because they’re ruining the old trees.) We also went to the fern house, and the tropical gardens.This photograph was one of a few that I took with my phone. Have a look at Kirsty’s photos!

On our way back out of the gardens ( along the foreshore of the Harbour towards the Opera House) we fed ducks, tried to feed hooter-tooters, but gulls intervened. Then we found a few sulphur-crested cockatoos feeding under a big tree. I brought out the bread & suddenly there were more. They came to sit all around us. One came onto my shoulder and looked me firmly in the eye, obviously saying ‘I’m a very nice ‘little’ bird, and I have bread.’ They are big birds with sharp beaks. I ended up with one attached to the nape of my neck and one attached itself to the top of Kirsty’s head. The bread was all gone.