Blue-billed Duck at Kelly's Swamp

I had a few minutes to spare in the ACT so took myself to Kelly's Swamp, hoping that a Buff-banded Rail would brave the rather average weather and put in an appearance.

On arrival at Cygnus, my hide (blind, for anyone in the US) of choice, the first thing I found was a pair of reading spectacles.  Rather try to describe them I took a phone-photo of them and posted a message with the photo to the COG chatline.  Within minutes I had a reply complaining commenting that I had not submitted any observations.  I explained that I was delaying as at least one birder would currently be unable to read the post.  (The glasses have now been reunited with their owner.)

The following should assuage any residual concerns.

Members of the Rallidae were well evident.  Unfortunately they were restricted to what a well known local naturalist has in the past referred to as "the eternal 3: Dusky Moorhen; Eurasian Coot and what is known currently as Australasian Swamphen.

Now growing up in England - where weather like today is normal - I always described cool, overcast, showery days as "Lovely weather for ducks."  I have since been told that ducks actually hate weather like this, and certainly there were not many around today.  I stuck to Cygnus hide as i didn't want to walk further in the rain and had only logged 1 Grey Teal and 2 Pacific Black Ducks when an unusual shape caught my eye.

The famous Kelly's Swamp Blue-billed Duck was still around and became Bird of the Day
 This image sort-of shows the stiff-tail which is diagnostic of this genus.
The bird's behaviour was quite interesting as it didn't stodge around on the surface as I have usually seen them do, but after few seconds out in the rain it would dive and swim a fair distance in a few seconds before coming up again.  One of its subaquatic forays was from A to B in this image, taking only a few seconds to do this.
It then vanished from view for several minutes before emerging at C.  I am curious as how it made this traverse.  Did it swim, above the water between the reeds, or did it maintain its preferred modus opernadi of swimming underwater?  Or did it clamber, Bittern-like, through the stems of the reeds? 

Comments

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