Masked lapwing

I have a soft spot for this bird. In the last place I lived in in Sydney before I moved to Japan, there was a large, empty lot on one of my walking routes. Like they had dug out a hole for an office building but then had never gotten around to it. It had been abandoned long enough that there was plenty of thick grass growing, and I vaguely remember it actually being kind of marshy too.

And so whenever I would pass it, I would always see one or two of these guys flying and screeching about - maybe they were a mating pair. And really that’s the only place I’ve ever seen them. So it was quite nice that I was able to get this close-up shot of it just chiling on the walking path right next to the water at the Sydney Botanical Gardens.