Wet places of Northish Canberra

I have used the term Northish since none of the material herein is from North Canberra SSD.  In fact a couple of items refer to places South of Lake Burley Griffin.  However since the Southern end of Canberra these days seems to be outer Cooma, all these areas are well North of the Southern bits.

Driving out to the Northern extremities (Forde again) I noticed fire "prevention" was happening.  I guess it keeps the firies off the streets,
Entering the suburb I was taken by this sign,
There were no unusual Rails etc visible at the Pond, although some clucks and squawks were coming from a dense patch of reeds.  This male Hardhead was more obliging, showing its white eye.
A pair of Masked Lapwings gave me a fair swooping before one of them got back to the business of brooding!
 This Dusky (note colour of the back) Moorhen got reproduced under the 'spiffy image' rule!
 I then moved a bit South to Mackellar Pond where this Little Pied Cormorant posed nicely ..
 .. as did a White-faced Heron.
My next stop was Lake Ginninderra in an unsuccessful hunt for Night-herons.  I was successful with Red-rumped Parrots!  These images are both of males, proving that Ocker Psittacoides are very colourful!  The females are rather drab - but in both cases can be very hard to spot in shady grass.
 Click on this next one to get a bigger pic: really spiffy and shows the red rump (again).
This very pleasant carving was in the area where I saw the parrots but I couldn't find out any info about the work.
I passed Norgrove Park which was pretty much devoid of birds- the developments in the area seem to have made it unattractive to them.  So I moved on to Jerrabomberra Creek at the Tadorna Hide.  The best sighting there was a pair of Masked Lapwings with two fluffballs,  One of them is in the bottom of this image!
 Going to Fulica Hide I finally got to see Nankeen Night-herons - note the two plumes!
 If you click on this image there is a Night-heron at each edge, approximately in the middle vertically.  There are a couple more lurking further back in the mess - congratulations to Steve from COG for picking those up in this low quality image! I am used to seeing them quite high in trees rather than in flood debris close to the water,
My outing finished at the National Gallery of Australia where this Pacific Black Duck was flashing its green speculum in the pool around the Turrell!

Comments

Denis Wilson said…
Firies in Heaven.
'Twas a day for the Burn-offs, everywhere, it seems.
Great photos of the Hard Head, Red-rump Parrot and White-faced Heron.
Nice work.
Denis
5 September 2012 at 01:02:00 GMT+10
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