The Great Great Crested Grebe Hunt

I don't know what the syntax police will make of that subject line:  Great-Great? Great-great? Great-crested? Crested-Grebe all seem viable alternatives.

Late last week a notice was posted on the COG chatline that an immature Great Crested Grebe had been sighted in West (indeed very far West  - you can spit into NSW from there) Belconnen.  For Bird A Day purposes that would be a very Great bird.

So off I went on an attempt to locate this bird.  This is one view of the West Belconnen Pond, looking from the North-Western .  You will note that the panorama is totally clear of Great Crested Grebes.
I was intrigued by this notice, which appeared to be hanging on the fence which follows the ACT/NSW border.
Why is DoF putting up such signs?  Could it be something to do with the nearby powerlines - but what is that to do with Finances?  Surely it is not to stop people from spitting across the border? Suggestions welcome.

I then moved a kilometre or thereabouts South to Fassifern Pond.  It is very small - too small to really host my target Grebe, but it did have an Eastern Great Egret (which became Bird of the Day) as well as a few other species.
 Still having a little time to spare I took myself to Shepherds Lookout on Stockdill Drive, Holt.  I didn't expect to see a Grebe there - the Murrumbidgee is not quite their habitat.
 I did spot an odd lump in the River but it turned out to be a fisherperson.
So on Sunday I decided to check the big settling pond at Queanbeyan Poo Pits,  I have seen a Great Crested Grebe there in the past but that was then and now all the grebes were small.  A Hardhead became Bird of the Day, although the most curious sight was a Great Cormorant on a nest on a platform in the pond.
On Monday I was in Canberra so checked out bits of Lake Burley Griffin, which have previously been graced with the hairy grebe.  From the bridge at Warrina Inlet I could see no grebes but a heap of Australian Wood Ducks: my count was 289 (some are out of this image).
 Crossing Scrivener Dam my next call was Acacia Inlet.  A good crop of Australasian Swamphens (Bird of the Day) but no Grebes (of any size).
 At the risk of being boring the same applied to the Lake near the outflow of Sullivans Creek.
Now Great Crested Grebes are found in parts of Tasmania so I thought the pond in the Tasmanian part of the National Botanic Gardens might be the go.
Nope: too small and too many reeds!

Other members of COG have assisted by naming the many other water bodies in the area which were also free of Great Crested Grebes on this date.

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