This week in the Australian Botanical gardens, Mount Annan I got an early start, as a member of Friends of the gardens One of the benefits is extra hour access, so as long as its light your permitted entry to the gardens, this means you get access when hardly anyone else is around so the wild life is undisturbed and you don’t have to worry about other people in the back ground of your shots the gardens are very popular and with Free access all year round a great place for family get togethers BBQs etc.

This morning I entered the gardens around 6:30am so nice early start, As usually for Saturday I’m on the look out for any Mushrooms for my Shoot mushroom Saturday shot, plus adding to my collection of Bird shots form the gardens and any interesting plants so plenty to choose from.

This morning one of the first thing I found was a Masked Lapwing  chick, First one of these I’ve seen in the gardens this small, it didn’t stray far from its parents and I didn’t get to close so didn’t get a great shot of this one, shame.

 I then run across a family of Australian Wood Duck  (Maned Duck) out for a stroll to the pond.

At the pond the usually suspects were all there, and I managed to get this nice one of an Australasian Grebe near the bank.

While at the lake I again started to practice my panning technique still a way to go on that yet but managed to get this one of a Little Pied Cormorant not so bad, still not happy with the results yet though.

An Nankeen Kestrel was also out hunting and I managed a few shots of it hovering as well.

From there I went to the connections gardens and captures a few flowers in bloom including a revisit to last week’s White Waratah still in flower.

While at the water Garden I spotted a water dragon out sunning itself and managed to get quite close without scaring it off so got this shot down low.

The Mushroom hunt wasn’t so successful and all I managed to find in the end was alone puffball, so this is my submission to shoot mushroom Saturday for the week, The gardens are just not putting up mushrooms at present, But anyone missing them can check them out at my Gallery page where I have a dedicated Mushroom Gallery feel free to browse around double clicking any image will bring it larger size on the screen double clicking again will give you a full screen shot.  

Thanks for dropping by.

Glenn