More testing

 Today I thought I would got to MSAC before it got closed off.  Leaving the tram stop, at least one resident had expressed an opinion about the bogans.  I suspect the majority of locals would agree with their sentiment, if not precisely his choice of words.

This is Gunn Island, still well decorated with Australian White Ibis, about 450m away, at 8x magnification.
Mud Island with a city backdrop.
I met my friend Cathy (who was on a run round the Lake) and she told me she had seen A Great Crested Grebe and Grebeling earlier in her outing at the South end of the Lake.  Here are Ibis, Swans and friends on Mud Island.
Great Cormorants: 150m range.
I then discovered how to add digital zoom (up to 40x) and got this bunch of Little Corellas.
Some Ibis flew by.
A Gull passed by some Corellas o the edge of the NE ponds.
A Pied Stilt (BAD) with a Silver Gull.
The back side of Gunn Island.
Oops!
Men at rest.  Certainly not working.  This is why they need months to set things up.  If they didn't farnarkle about setting up video screens and such like crap they could a) do it in about 1/4 the time cost and b) do far less damage to the Park infrastructure.

I decided to walk to the SE end rather than cut through to the Toorak Rd tram stop, but didn't spot the Grebes (nor yesterday's Crake).

On the 12th we went to the mouth of Laverton Creek at Altona (the eBird Hotspot is Apex Park (Altona) ) hoping for Banded Stilt.  When we first arrived we saw a couple of Stilts at the mouth of the Creek along with a massive (~1000 birds was my guess) flock of Silver Gulls.  The following image suggests one of the Stilts had an all-white head but my memory is of a dark patch on the crown making it a relatively common Pied Stilt.
Heading upstream we found a fairly large flock of mixed stilts.  The red arrow points at a bird on which the band is just visible; the yellow arrows to the white-heads of other Banded Stilts; and the green arrows to a few of the Pied Stilts.  They were about 150m away (measured on Google Earth) which was probably a tad beyond the limit of my camera.
In the evening I took a couple of shots from the Winter Garden as the sun set.  The first image was taken at 1951hrs ...
and this at 2010hrs



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

More in the vicinity of 505

Image
 This is pretty much our morning on 8 August.  It begins looking out the windows towards the CBD, with some light clouds well below the tops of the high rises.  My guess would be the 60th floor. On our walk we saw some signs of Spring! And a very nice display of orchids in a front yard near South Yarra Primary. On the other side of the Park the Tonka trucks were still at play.  There is much scope for further photos as they knock down this building.  (I don't know how the punters work in the white building while this is going on,) I have activated Google Lens on my phone, and it identified Clivia miniata for me! We have watched the demolition as it has proceeded.  By 11 September (a month later) the high stuff has all gone and only cleaning up the ground is needed.  (Frances took this image from St Kilda Rd - the opposite end of the site to my earlier photos.)
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