TING! IT'S THE BELL MINERS

rosalie

The sounds that attracted me to the bell miner

Walking along the paths in the Long Island area of the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, you hear the ting ting of the tiny Bell Miners as they harvest nectar and insects from the foliage of the eucalyptus trees in the area. If you are lucky enough to see one, you'll notice that it opens its beak and throws its head back like an opera star to make the ringing ting sound which seems impossibly loud coming from such a small bird...

Then it takes off like a bolt from a crossbow to alight on another branch in the canopy of eucalyptus leaves. If you are able to focus on one bird you will often see another crash land onto the first bumping chests and begging for food. These fluffy greyish youths seem to be generously tolerated by the sleek olive green adults. The birds are gaudily decorated with bright yellow in beaks, and some yellow tail feathers, orange claws and a red orange bare eye patch. Yet even with these bright colours and the iridescent olive green plumage they are difficult to see in the canopy as the eucalyptus leaves hang from yellow orange stems and the birds are often foraging in between the leaf curtains.

​Once we photographed one of the adults alighting on a low branch of a tree near the lake to drink, but it was only there for minutes before it took off for the high canopy again. When I decided to draw the Bell Miners I wanted to evoke the beauty of the small birds but also to convey how elusive they are. So from many blurred images of them swinging on leaves in the canopy and a couple of sharper images to get the facial features I posed a bird that had stopped its feeding to look straight at me through the leaf curtain. In order to show the face in close up I posed a Bell Miner on a branch near the water in the foreground and to show the fleeting nature of the bird a second takes off and fades into the background.