Birding gets interesting as the year winds down

IMHO birding is usually interesting, but the recent period is perhaps a tad more so than average.

Taste alert: one of the images that follows is a bit gruesome.  That comes with the territory when looking at raptors!

My first comment is that I have had to update the comments about Frogmouths in yesterday's post,  All 4 of them are now present!

I am sure that we have had Collared Sparrowhawks nesting close to our property.  However I have not been able to find the nest, nor see the adult feeding the young.  Today an adult was calling a lot down by the Creek and, apart from a couple of flights between trees when I first got there, was very obliging in posing.
From the size I am confident it was a female.  Each time she landed with the prey she'd call loudly, but no-one answered.
Here is the prey - you were warned - and I think its avian.  If pushed I'd rate it as a headless chook, but it isn't running around.
Later in the day I went to see what was going on in some of the Bungendore wet places.  In essence, return of waterfowl is what is going on.

Bungendore Meadow Dam, which has been almost devoid of ducks recently had quite a good crop, amongst the cattle.  There were about 20 Shelduck with the biggest number being 97 Australian Wood Ducks.
Moving round the corner I was initially disappointed with Plumed Whistling Ducks.  Then I heard an odd noise and discovered 31 of them up against the roadside fence.
Another 2 were out on the edge of the water, apparently gleaning corn from the cattle crap.  (David McDonald has written this unusual behaviour up in Canberra Bird Notes.)
 There were several fowl on the Bungendore poo pits and quite a lot on the Big Dam on Lake Road.  It still has a lot of water!
So does Lake George, but the heat haze was so bad I had trouble seeing anything in detail.
Joe Hockey will be pleased to see the wind farm is still there and looking attractive to rational people.

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