Jonah Lafferty

just being able to tell what a bird is by the way it flies or like just like you might just get a dash of it but just understanding what habitat you're in the way that it moved and so you may not even see the colors or get a good look at it but just having that kind of habitat kind of contextual understanding you can have a pretty good guess at what it is that's probably when i thought oh dear i'm starting to really fall down this bird rabbit hole

Look, I don't have a silver bullet explanation, Kirsty, but I love car park birds.

As a bird photographer, somebody who loves to photograph birds, car parks are 110% the best place because I find that the behavior of the birds that hang out at the car park is so much more...

people friendly like they they're willing to um tolerate me that's the word i'm looking for they're so much more tolerant of me and my camera and they are so much more likely to hop in a good spot and also especially if you're in like a rainforest or like a like somewhere where it's quite hard to see birds quite hard to get them landing in nice light then a car park's the best place because yeah they're used to people

um they often land in really you know places where there's a bit more light perhaps due to the clearing so that's nice for people who like taking photos um and i do just love this phenomenon right like i was listening kirsty to um the episode a few ago with justine and i think she saw regent honey eaters in like the woolworths yeah and shout out to kylie soans who saw uh i think it was the purple crown lorikeet in the kfc car park in toolkit so yeah there's lots of good stories

I actually saw purple crown lorikeets in a Woolworths car park the first time I saw them as well.

So there you go.

But yeah, it's a wonderful phenomenon and it is nice.

It's really nice to get to see birds that are quite rare in places that or whether they're rare.

Another example is actually yesterday while I was camping, I had a cool experience at the campsite.

Because again, it's another one of those spots that's a bit open.

The birds are perhaps a little bit more used to seeing people.

And I saw a pair of noisy pitters jumping out in the campsite.

And again, noisy pitters are a bird that, you know, normally in dense, thick rainforest, really hard to get a good look at.

It was still hard to see and photograph them, of course.

But to see noisy pitters jumping around like the campsite was great.

So yeah, like I think

You know, there's an extra bit of magic to seeing birds in more places that we might consider more kind of quote unquote wild.

But, you know, it's still just wonderful to see them where they're a bit more used to us as people as well.

That's such a good example of a built environment that's just world class for birding, you know, like you've got car parks, parks and then just incredible birds around there.