ONE MOMENT IN TIME
FLIGHTS OF NATURE IN MY GARDEN
A CHALLENGE FOR THE CAMERA
Fastfood for kookaburras
KOOKABURRAS: they drop by my property at dusk,
around five in the afternoon. And quietly wait for my wife
Irene to give them a feed.
By ALFREDO
'DING' ROCES
A noisy gang of seven or eight. At
first we tried various types of food, moist
bread, some fruit peelings, bits of chicken
and minced meat.
They quickly made their preference
known: Chicken sausages.
To protect our fingers we use
chopsticks.
Irene has now mastered the
technique to get them to fly up and grab
the bit of sausgage on chopsticks she has
raised up high in the air.
Zoom! It takes less than a second
My camera was always too late, until I
learned to anticipate and trip the shutter
with the first flutter of wings.
Not all the kookaburras are prepared
to fly for their supper. The majority just
stand quietly waiting to be fed or for food
to be placed on the table beside them.
There are those who also fight for
these scraps. But we favour the one or two
who float through the air like the daring
young man on a flying trapeze. n
ALFREDO ROCES is an artist,
photojournalist, and book author living
in the Sydney suburb of Davidson;
an octogenarian who in retirement
continues to love life and to capture its
wonder with his paint brush, his camera,
and his words. Roces has opened his
‘gallery archive’ to AK NewsMagazine for
readers to follow and enjoy each month.
A BLUR of blue marks the noisy quarrel between two kookaburras.
06
OCTOBER 2017 | AK NewsMagazine, Vol 8 No 1
Kookaburras fl oat down for a bite from Irene’s menu on chopsticks.
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