I’ve been watching birds for a very long time. Probably more than thirty years.  I didn’t start taking photos of them, though, until digital photography made it affordable. And I didn’t start keeping a “List” until the last quarter of 2016, when I joined a birding group, with a friend.

My camera is a Point and Shoot Canon. A very good PaS though, a . What it may lack in speed, it makes up for in zoom. It may not have the absolute clarity that a DSLR has, but it’s perfect for me and my budget.

There are a few ways to navigate this site. You can simply start at the front page, which is my newest photos, going backwards, or you could use the Archives page do the same thing, but that gives you a list of dates by month, and includes the number of entries for that month.
The Life List heading takes you to a numbered list of birds I have posted, with their common name, and binomial name.
The Locations page is a list of locations I’ve taken photos of birds, and each link will take you to a page of all birds from that location.
The Tags page is a “tag cloud” which indicated by the size of the text which listings have the most entries. If you want to see all of my ducks, for example, use the tags page, and click “duck“. The same for “https://melaniejcook.com/tag/pigeon/”, but not magpie, as we only have one magpie species in Australia, so there isn’t much point tagging the magpie posts “magpie”.

The categories page is simply a method I’ve used to loosely group birds according to type. I’ve used my Slater Field Guide as a starting point for doing this, and some categories are much broader than others. And a little odd. Bee-eaters and Rollers are included in “Kingfishers“. But Ducks, Geese and Swans included Ducks, coots, geese, swans, pelicans, grebes, – waterfowl. Whereas “Waterfowl” covers Crakes, Rails, Jacanas, Swamphen, Moorhen, Coots, Cormorant, Darter.