Shorebirds from the Point and other stuff

A comment on the Mallacoota Birds Facebook page mention some White-fronted Terns being seen in the mouth of the Snowy River.  This species migrates from New Zealand to Australia over Winter.   It isn't a complete movement as shown in the follow snips from eBird.


I thought that the species might have come to Mallacoota also, and that the best chance of seeing it/them was from Captain Stephenson's Point, as the sand bars on with terns loaf are closer to the point than the beach at Bastion Point.  To my astonishment almost the first bird was a much smaller tern.  I hoped it was a White-fronted Tern: unfortunately looking at my references raised doubts and when another observer saw Little Terns at the same spot and a Facebook comment said "Little"  that was it  Here it is in the background.
And then on its own
Something - I suspect a Whistling Kite, but didn't see more than a large raptorish shape - flew over and caused all the terns to take to the air.
They settled down again with one of the 21 Australian Pied Oystercatchers.
There were 10 Bar-tailed Godwits feeding in the shallows.  They should be in Siberia now but have obviously decided not to bother.  This one is in pretty close to full breeding plumage
Later in the day as well around the Betka area Frances noticed a 'different' lump on the top of this rock. 
 It was a Sooty Oystercatcher in an unusual location (I'd expect it to have a nose bleed that far off the ground!)
 We also noticed a fair array of fungus.  Attempts at naming to follow.



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

Satin Bowerbird gets ready for Lanigans Ball.

Image
Having some time to spare today I went to check the bower near "Tom Green's Seat" in the Australian National Botanic Gardens.  The bower was well occupied by what I take to be - based on the green plumage and yellow bill - a 5th or 6th year male Satin Bowerbird.  (With all these images, click on them for a bigger - unfortunately not better focused picture.  The shots were taken hand held on full zoom from about 10m distance into a fairly well shaded location.) He was very much engaged in adding to the construction. Then it seemed that another bird called from the bush above.  This led to a whole lot of activity: the most spectacular (and worst imaged) was a flash of the wings: The bird also did a fair bit of hopping around.  Given that it was still immature I called to mind the greatest traditional Irish song of all time: Diarmuid O'Leary and the Bards performing Lanigan's Ball .  This ditty refers to spending "6 long months at Brooks Academy learning
Read more