Bird-A-Day for January 2016 is done (for me)

As expected my final bird in the Bird-a-day competition starting in January 2016 was Australian Magpie, on June 23.  This meant I had got 8 days further than last year.  As that was also an improvement on the previous year I have 3 observations, which means it is mechanically possible to construct a trendline.  Whether it is sensible to do so is another matter but, with that available EXCEL, enables me to project forward 190 periods (thus ending on 31 December) which shows I will complete the BaD year in 2045!  Something to look forward to!

I should note that on June 24 a Yellow-billed Spoonbill was briefly apparent at Jerrabombera Wetlands so I did an 80km, and 3 hour, round trip to fail to see it.  At least I didn't wimp out of trying.

The pattern I have previously reported of keeping both my index score and my BaD rating a little on the rarer side of last year has continued.  This means that my running average BaD rating was a little higher ....
 ... and my average Index score a little lower than in 2015.
I recorded 35 birds in 2016 that I didn't use in 2015 and (as arithmetic would suggest) in 2016 I failed to find 26 birds used in 2015.  

Several of the additions this year (eg Grey-crowned Babbler, Plum-headed Finch and Bluebonnet) , come from trips to the Western Slopes or to Mallacoota.  The main source of missing in action for 2016 (birds such as Chirruping Wedgebill and Purple-crowned Lorikeet) was a set logged on a 2015 trip to South Australia via Broken Hill.

The most annoying 'not-counted' birds in 2016 were:
  • the Hudsonian Godwit at Woolumboola Lake (beaten out by the Paradise Shelduck at the same venue on the same day); and 
  • White throated Needletail, seen on several days in March at Mallacoota but always beaten out by 'better' birds.  I spent a lot of time looking at storm clouds in Carwoola but it was a poor year for swifts in this area.
I have previously commented on the most annoying recorded bird being Southern Whiteface.  Just after finding a flock of them a Brown Falcon went by but wasn't preferred.  A few days later I found another group of Whiteface which I couldn't use.   Ethics are terrible things.  It looked as though I was going to dip on the Falcon - until I happened to look at a photo of a flock of panic-stricken Galahs and realised I had captured a Brown Falcon ripping through the flock.

Comments

Ian Fraser said…
Excellent work that man! Pity it had to end - couldn't you just have set out north or west on the afternoon of the 23rd??? You'll need to plan more trips for next year.
26 June 2016 at 10:31:00 GMT+10
Flabmeister said…
Thanks Ian. Your final thought has already been put forward as draft policy. It is likely that very West may be the go.

Martin
26 June 2016 at 12:22:00 GMT+10
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 rec...
Read more

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 ...
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 bird...
Read more