Hello, again! (2 Viewers)

[Joe H]

Greetings! I was a member of Birdforum from September 2004 to July 2008. My wife got me into bird watching in 2003 and this site helped me research optics purchases and pre-vacation planning. Previously I posted about birding in Alaska and even Baghdad while I was there for a winter (I see the report is still in the Vacational Trip Report section): Birding around baghdad

But family and job commitments took their toll until now, when glorious retirement has gifted me enough time to refocus on personal hobbies. After a 14 year hiatus I hope a new introductory post here isn’t out of line. I did continue birding while on work trips, mostly in the South Pacific. In fact, my avatar is a picture of a Yellow-bibbed Lory (Lorius chlorocercus) I took while on a work trip to Taro Island in Choiseul Provence of the Solomon Islands.

Anyway, it’s great to be back on this site. I’m already reading about the new Swarovski 7x21s as a replacement for my leaky old Leica Ultaravid 8x20s.

 

[Fritz73]

Hola Joe! Welcome back

 

[Chris G6 UXU]

Hello Joe and welcome back, enjoy and all the best.

 

[delia todd]

Hi Joe and a warm welcome back to you.

That was a wonderful find seeing the Lory and getting a picture of him too. If you have a larger size copy of the image, we'd be really grateful if you could upload it to the Gallery - it would be the very first to come in and if you don't mind, it will also be added to The Opus article for the species.

Let me know if you need help putting it in the Gallery.

 

[Lisa W]

Hi, Joe. Welcome back.

 

[KC Foggin]

Welcome back Joe

 

[Joe H]

Thanks all, for the warm welcome! I will upload the Y-B Lory picture(s), I have a couple. First I’ll have to transfer some image files from one computer to the one I’m currently using. The image I used on my avatar was actually a picture of a picture on the screen of one of my old laptops. The image files on the old computer will be better in terms of resolution and file size. I have some lucky pictures of rare-ish birds that I’ll also add to the gallery once I find them all. I have an ID-worthy but somewhat blurry picture of the Iraqi Babbler (Turdoides altirostris) which I tried and failed to upload years ago. Maybe I can figure it out this time. Again, thank you all for the welcome. I’m really glad this site is still active after all these years!

 

[Joe H]

Hi again. Delia, I uploaded the photo to the Gallery section. It was the best of the pictures I had (the only one where the focus was on the bird rather than the background). I noted that pets are not allowed. While I doubt this bird would be considered a pet, it was obviously habituated to people and almost certainly fed. If that violates any rules of this site, I'd have no problem if it needs to be removed.

 

[delia todd]

Hi Joe

Thanks for that. A pet bird would be so considered if it was kept in a cage, making it completely reliant on people for all its needs, or had it's flight feathers removed etc. making it impossible to fly away. If it lives in the wider countryside coming to feeders in a garden, these aren't considered to be pets.

 

[Kits]

Welcome back!