Garden birds, Double Creek and the outlet

We brought one of our bird baths down from Carwoola and initially placed it amongst some pelargoniums.  The birds ignored it completely.  We moved it towards a Camellia bush and it now gets quite a bit of action:  I haven't recorded the visitors in a rigorous fashion but guess about 6 species so far have actually used it.

To start the narrative, here is the Camellia bush.
This bush is very popular with New Holland Honeyeaters:
This leads them to the bath.
 I haven't seen a Common Bronzewing on the bath, but when one displays its bronze wing so nicely it has to be photographed.
 Around noon I went for a walk around the Double Creek Nature Trail, about 5km along Genoa Rd.  A visiting friend had tried this a couple of weeks ago and it was flooded/
 It isn't flooded now the Inlet has been drained!  (Incidentally my camera's effort at this was rather underexposed, so I have edited the shot with Photoshop Express: a free program from Adobe.  I am finding this quite useful for improving poor snaps.)
 From the higher bits of the trail the magnificent eucalypts can be see coming out of the rainforested gully.
 A helpful sign: at least for those trees with leaves less than 50m in the air!
 The walk isn't particularly friendly to the disabled!
 This is an interesting area for birding.  There have been 113 species recorded here, but many of the checklists have quite modest totals.  I scored 10 species - which probably understates the total and "heard-only" records were not possible due to lyrebirds mimicking everything!  My best sighting was  Red-browed Treecreeper - my first sighting for the general area, although there are many reports from nearby.
The orange pin is my record: it appeared on the internet 5 minutes after I submitted the checklist (at home as there is no phone signal on the walk!

Our final activity was a walk to Bastion Point.  I hoped that this was a Lesser Sand Plover but gurus on the Mallacoota Birds FB page said "Double-banded".
We went to check the outlet which is brilliant,  The erosive power of water has it running very well.
I suspect the line of breakers show where much of the sand has been dumped.  These guys are far braver than me.  Its good that they are both wearing life jackets!

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