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Saturday 2 July 2011

Caught on Film. A Mysterious Bird and a Plant Squishing Cat

Finally I have photographic evidence of the Felonius Feline sleeping where she should not be sleeping. It was a moment after a brief tropical rain storm and the birds were singing with joy as they preened themselves and fluffed their feathers dry. No doubt like some humans they too like to sing in the shower. Although in fact they are singing after their shower and decidedly more tuneful than most humans.

Anyway I heard some strange notes and grabbed my camera in the hopes of being able to catch the mysterious singer. To my consternation the first thing I see when I stepped outside was this:

You must hand it to her though. When I confronted her she just kept her eyes closed pretending to be asleep. But by the twitching of her tail tip I knew she was faking it. Besides there is a decided difference in the way sleeping eyes look compared to the closed eyes of someone (feline or human) who is pretending to be asleep. She even tried to peek at me through little slits but then closed them tighter when she saw I was still there. As you can see in the photo with her tightly closed eye she is definately NOT sleeping. I do not think she realises that it is impossible to sleep with you head up like that. Incidentally THAT is the pot which had the white ground orchids ( Spathoglottis plicata ). Lucky for her they are dead and gone otherwise if it had been a pot with live plants in it she would have gotten a jugof water on her.

In disgust I went off to look for the bird following its whistles to the chain link fence over grown with mile-a-minute between me and the coco plantation next door. I caught sight of the bird perched in a coco tree and was just trying to focus on it when it flew away. I guess it was not a paparazzi fan.
The good thing was that it could not keep its mouth shut and I was able to track it down again encouraging it to whistle by mimicking it. This time it was all the way up in a Breadfruit tree. So carefully I stalked into position and with trembling hands tried to get some decent shots of it.


These were the only ones I was able to get because each time I moved to get into a better position I had to refocus all the time hoping that I would not frighten it off or that it would not decide that another location was better. In any case I have never seen one of these birds in Samoa.

I have tried uploading it to my page on the Internet Bird Collection but was having trouble. Maybe I will be able to get it on eventually.

Mean time this is the link to the site which I have already uploaded photos of other birds I managed to get shots off.

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