In my (limited) experience, it seems the preferred perch for a rainbow bee-eater in this part of the world is a barbed-wire fence. Driving up a quiet gravel road behind Daintree after a morning storm, this bird went up into a tree. Moved the truck into a position with (I thought) a decent background, then shooting over though the passenger side window I got this before it flew away. Looking at Morcombe's, the pale blue feathers, the underdeveloped throught bands and lack of the long tail feather, this is a juvenile, so it clearly did not know the local perching rules. Should have been at least f7.1.
800mm, 1/1600, f5.6, ISP1250.
Pale colours noted in your intro, so a nicely framed shot, good head angle on the bird. I might be tempted to clone out the dark patch in the BG just in from of the bird
Thanks for the comments on this, I reduced the exposure 0.4, it is better.
A note on the capture, it is optically limited as I was using a 2x, and in error it was wide open. It is a bit soft unless stopped down a little, but was setting up to hastily.