This is one of my favourite images from the #birdventurenz. It’s one of my favourite images so far. It’s not flashy, there’s no exciting action going on. It’s a moment shared between two kea, a quiet moment. It’s an apology.

These two birds had been tussling together on the roof of our car – as kea do. There was screeching and biting and flapping, but in the good-natured way of kea when you know they’re playing, that laughing call. Kea are remarkably intelligent birds – they have a ‘play’ call that is like infectious laughter in humans.

All of a sudden there was a different kind of screech – an ‘ow!’ screech. The youngster on the right stopped playing and hopped away. The bird on the left paused, and then walked over. They looked at each other. The bird on the left leaned its head against the bird on the right, with a quiet murmur. There’s only one way I can interpret that – and that’s ‘sorry’.

As a scientist I shouldn’t anthropomorphise birds. I shouldn’t ascribe character to them and meaning to their interactions. But how else can I understand it? How else can we empathise with them, care about them?

As a photographer, I spend a lot of time watching birds. Learning how they behave and interact so that I can predict what they’ll do, so that I can make better images of them. For The Brilliance of Birds, these moments are the ones I set out to capture. To show character, to find emotion, to document interactions between birds that we can find parallels for in human behaviour. To capture feeling. In this image, more than any other, I feel like I’ve achieved that goal.