COG prowls South of Tharwa

17 members gathered at the Visitors’ Centre just South of Tharwa on a beautiful morning.

We headed off to do the Woodland Loop trail, beginning by crossing the wall of the small dam. Several Australian Reed-warblers were calling in the dense reeds and a single Australasian Grebe in breeding plumage was in the water.

A good collection of returned migrants were breeding: Noisy Friarbird; White throated Gerygone (occupied nest);

Dusky Woodswallow (recently fledged young,

 and agitated behaviour in chasing off a Grey Butcherbird). Other breeding records were Australian Magpie (Recently fledged young); Magpie Lark (recently fledged young) and Common Starling (visiting probable nest site).

No evidence of breeding by a male White-winged Triller, but its a good bird ..

... and Welcome Swallows are always attractive.

Many of the Blakely's Gums were in a bad way from lerp

but this didn't seem to have attracted a huge number of Pardalotes.  We were intrigued at the infrastructure supporting a decrepit (in heritage-speak " fragile") tree ...

which turned out to have a survey blaze cut into it.

When we got back to the car park we found another flying thing:

At least it didn't dump rocks and dirt all over the cars unlike an earlier episode at Glendale Crossing! 

Moving down to the Gudgenby river we added a few standard species plus the first Rainbow Bee-eater for the day. We totalled 36 species for the site.

Moving to Tharwa Sandwash, 

we started with an unsuccessful search for the Tawny Frogmouths, concluding by looking across the Murrumbigdgee. 2 Black-fronted Dotterels were doing their thing on the waterline while a Nankeen Kestrel perched on a large dead tree opposite.

 A Dollarbird appeared and disappeared into a hollow. After some discussion of the time it spent in the hollow, this was rated as an occupied nest rather inspecting the hollow.

Another dead tree caused us to log (sorry) Tree Martins inspecting a hollow. A Laughing Kookaburra excited us as it was carrying a snake – estimated as 50cm in length -as it flew to a tree and subsequently across the river. One Rainbow Bee-eater posed nicely for us.

We totalled 30 species at this site, despite the lack of Red-rumped Parrots, Red-browed finches and several other expected species.

Across the 2 sites we recorded a pretty good total of 47 species.

There were some nicely flowering eucalypts including a Yellow Box (E. meliodora) 

There were also a lot of weeds:

Quite pretty, but still weeds.  In terms of ferals we noted some huge carp, apparently spawning in the river.

These have been reported to feralscan.