Getting rid of a bogey.

I will justify the title of this post with a comment from Sue Taylor's blog:
"Most birders have a bogey bird - that's a bird that they've looked for on several occasions, but which continues to elude them. It's sometimes called a 'jinx bird.' "
Now I have searched for Pied Butcherbirds within the ACT in at least the following ways:

  • Hall Cemetery on several occasions;
  • Chapman Ridge at a ridiculously early hour of the morning;
  • Mulligan's Flat for many hours including some rather long bike rides to get there;
  • Urriara Village on several occasions

all to no avail.  To make matters worse by the time I got home (wherever that was at the time) there is usually a post to the COG Chatline explaining how the bird had just stolen someone's lunch (or in the cases like Chapman Ridge, breakfast) 5 minutes after I left the area.

 So when I saw Maurits Zwankhuizen's post to the COG Chatline yesterday ....
"Seeing Peter Milburn's posting, I went looking for the Pied Butcherbird yesterday without luck, although Noisy Miner alarm calls did lead me to a Grey Currawong. "I was more fortunate this morning and found the Pied Butcherbird sitting quite openly in the trees right in front of the National Film & Sound Archive.  This was around 9:40am."
.... I thought here is another nice waste of my time coming up.

 When we got to the National Film and Sound Archive 
My attention was immediately grabbed by Noisy Miners making a ruckus at point A.  Sure enough ...
 .. just like Maurits' experience the miners were mobbing a Grey Currawong.  So I carried on to Liversedge St, where some more Miners and an Australian Raven were creating a noise.  No sign of a Butcherbird.

So I lapped the Archive building with my usual level of success (in the middle of -1 and +1).  When I returned to my start point there was still noise coming from Liversedge St so I cut through some gardens close to the Archive building.  A bird landed in an old pine tree at point B, with its back to me: definitely a butcherbird but what sort?  Then I saw the front!  Bingo!  A bogey no more.
 A dead tree next to the building seems to have been selected as a des-res by bees and the butcherbird was stooping into the insects and appeared to be taken then for food.
 Here is another image: taken because I could!
Following Ian Fraser's comment (see below) I checked the excellent COG Birdinfo page for this species and took this snapshot of the distribution around 'Canberra':
 In essence the darker the pink the higher the reporting rate.  A dash shows no reports of the species and a grey box means o reports at all for that 2.5" square.

The reporting rate is an interesting shape.  I will try to form some hypotheses (OK guesses) about

  • why the species has increased in the area in several recent years and/or 
  • why the rate has a couple of drops.


and

Comments

Ian Fraser said…
Excellent - congratulations! I only managed it late last year near Uriarra Village, after numerous attempts. And on that day I was so brain-dead having just got back from Sth America that I went out without binocs (!) - fortunately the universe took pity on me and the bird flew down almost at my feet!
16 August 2014 at 09:10:00 GMT+10
Flabmeister said…
Thanks Ian. I am surprised that people have still "needed" this species. I thought they were getting so common around Canberra that I was the only person who hadn't got the ACT tick. I feel a little research coming on!

Martin
16 August 2014 at 10:09:00 GMT+10
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