Jerrabombera Wet(ter)lands

Following a report by the Ranger for this area to the COG Chatline about a lot (71 from memory) of Cattle Egrets in the grazed part of the Wetlands I wandered in on Tuesday, since that species would be good for my Bird-a-Day project.   Yes, that is still going 100 days into the year.  On Tuesday I got just-tickable views of 2 Egrets down by the Molonglo.

Today, Thursday as soon as I arrived at the Wetlands, where the sky was depositing more wetness, I spotted some white lumps on the top of some fence posts.
My binoculars soon confirmed that these were not cockatoos or gulls but Cattle Egrets.  Scanning around the paddock eventually gave me a total of 47 Cattle Egrets visible, and I suspect there were more hiding in the thistles; behind the Angus; or just down in the paleo-channels.

To prove they are Cattle Egrets here they are with a non-hippo.
 Moving over to Fulica Hide on Jerrabombera Creek I got a reasonable image of a White-faced Heron ....
 .... but the Nankeen Night Heron in the middle of nearby willows was not photographically cooperative.  It was however ticked for Bird-a-Day.

Getting back to the Swamp, the Ranger had commented that some water was back but only 6" deep.  That has I suspect increased and water is easily visible from Cygnus Hide.
So are the Swamp-hens, especially when they perch on the vertical logs.
I then wandered along Dairy Road to look through the fence into pond 6 of the Poo Pits which had a few waterfowl taking advantage of the peace occasioned by the members of the CFMEU being rained out.  Interestingly most of the birds visible were Pink-eared Ducks.

As I walked back through Kellys I could look down from the site of the former lookout and clearly see both water and fowl in the Swamp.  Small numbers of ducks (mainly Pacific Black Duck and Grey Teal as far as I could see) were continually flying in during my visit.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A tour of the West (part 1)

Image
A friend from my time in the UN sent me some photos of her family trip along Route 66.  They did this is a large camperwagon rather than a Chevy Corvette (apparently the kids jacked up about being offered a trip in the trunk).  It seems to have been a very good trip for them and most interesting to see their photos.  It was also educational for me, as I found out the German for rocking chair (schaukelstuhl, since you ask). They did 7200 miles in 30 days - a pretty serious bit of distance. This made me think of the trips we did in 1981 when living in Denver.  Frances initiated that idea by getting a book about the National Parks of the West  and marking interesting places.  I then worked out a route on a Rand-McNally Road Atlas (GPS was unknown then  - as were iPhones, personal computers and the internet).  From memory, taking nearly the whole Summer school holidays we covered about 10,000 miles in 70 days.  Here, approximately,  are our routes: That map comes from Google Maps (G
Read more

Insects from pine trees

Image
This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I recall years ago driving al
Read more

Maslins beach rules

Image
Anyone who was in Adelaide in the 1970s will be having a good nudge nudge at that title.  However the beach is really nice even though it is the haunt (in Summer ) of naked people.  (As an aside one of the 'van park staff was talking to some other guests and commented that the sights on the beach in Summer were not at all exciting.)  In April it is the haunt of seniors, many of them exercising their dogs, and thus a far more attractive place. Getting to the beach was a walk of about 1km along roads, from our van.  The second half of this went past a rather daggy looking paddock with many formed ridges in it, as though it was irrigated, although a water sources wasn't evident.  The paddock got interesting towards the end as some green parrots appeared.  Thanks to Frances eye for detail we have subsequently identified these as Elegant Parrots: my first lifer for 2014.    The locale is indicated by the red lines in this mudmap: Here are the birds: The view from the top of
Read more