Birds of Melbourne: Crimson Rosella

Now that I've got a GoPro I'm constantly on the lookout for new and different things to film, and recently had the idea of trying to catch some of the neat birds that are present this far out in the suburbs of Melbourne. I was surprised at just how many species of parrots are found in Australia when I first moved here—I can think of at least four widely different ones I see around here on timescales from every few days to every few weeks. Anyway, I started putting out some birdseed, and last week I got lucky when a crimson rosella showed up to eat just a few minutes after I set up my camera. Crimson rosellas are native to the southern and eastern parts of Australia, and have a striking red-and-blue-and-black coloration. You can see (and hear) a few of them in action in the video below:

I think in future videos I'll try to stick to a more consistent field of view and resolution; I was experimenting changing between different ones, which made the final video a bit disjointed. I'm definitely still learning as I go, but it's great to be able to capture such high-quality video so easily. I've been a bit doubtful of the usefulness of shooting in 4k resolution when I only have a 1080p monitor and it chews up so much memory space, but I tried shooting some of the central segments of the video in 4k and even when downscaled to 1080p resolution it retains so much more detail. I'll definitely be experimenting more with it in future, maybe even start releasing videos in 4k? We'll see! I can't exactly promise more videos like this because it depends on the birds and luck, but I'd really like to do more, showing off more of the cool bird species around here. A hui hou!

Edit (1/26/21): There's a bird which I identified as a “myna” which flies by in the video, and I have recently discovered to my chagrin that I have misidentified it: it's actually a noisy miner. There are common mynas in Australia (an introduced pest), and they look fairly similar at first glance, but I've seen enough noisy miners around where I live to tell them apart now.