Saturday 19 November 2011

Long-necked turtles

Healesville Sanctuary, near Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
17.11.2011

Count the turtles on the picture below.

Pond life
When I took this shot I saw only one long-necked turtle. We were out looking for them and I was very pleased when I spotted one, sunning itself on a rock, I thought.
So, camera in hand, I started taking shots from a fairly obscured place then moved along to a better standpoint. While I was concentrating on the shots I heard a school teacher behind me: "Do you think that it is afraid of that bird?".
The answer was "Yes"! Soon after that the moorhen pecked the long-necked turtle and it promptly dived.
And from my earlier shots I could see that the turtle was well aware of the approaching bird, its long neck was well bent towards the moorhen.
The little pied cormorant ignored them altogether, fetched a stick and climbed on to the floating branch to the right of the scene.

So how many turtles did you count? The correct answer is at the very bottom.
In summary, the protagonists of the pond life were, from the left, little pied cormorant Phalacrocorax melanoleucos, dusky moorhen Gallinula tenebrosa and long-necked turtles Chelodina longicollis, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_long-necked_turtle.


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