Paradise Shelduck (1)

Here is a photo that Nigel took some time ago of a female Paradise Shelduck (Tadorna variegata), a common and very pretty duck here in New Zealand. They’re bigger than mallards and in the wild they’re very sensitive about intruders and honk noisily in unison as soon as they see you! Go a bit closer and they’ll take off into the air together, still honking their displeasure or consternation, or whatever it is!

The female has a high-pitched shrill honk and the male has a lower, gravelly sound. Here’s a sound recording

She is very eye-catching with her white head. He is much darker but has pretty markings. The Paradise Duck is endemic to New Zealand.

On Sunday we were looking around the grounds of a research campus and saw a family of paradise ducks. They were going to be the subject of my post today but my usual online image editor now wouldn’t recognise my files!

So here’s an older photo that Nigel took somewhere else of a female Paradise Shelduck. It was already sized ok for uploading.

ADVICE NEEDED PLEASE: To resize images, up till now I’ve used picresize and I can also use it to crop images when necessary. That’s all I need!

But now when I try to upload any image, it says “Sorry, please upload a valid image” even though the image is just the same as all the images I’ve edited with picresize in the past.

PLEASE does anyone recommend another simple image editor (whether its online like picresize or a simple download). I’m using Windows 7 on a laptop that has memory of 2GB, and I normally use Firefox as browser. I’m only interested in a free image editor.

If you have a recommendation, would you please tell me in the comments – thanks!

Best wishes
Liz

PS. The picresize image editor suddenly started working for me. I’ll put the pond images with the Paradise Duck family into a separate post.

PS2. I’d still be keen to receive any recommendations for another image editor!