Nik in Oz

Friday, 12 March 2010

Oriental Pratincole over-load !

After coming back from a wader count at 80 Mile beach, where 500,000 Oriental Pratincole had been counted, the team encountered 60,000 on Roebuck Plains. So a few days later i went to have a look and arriving on the plains we easily picked up the flocks wheeling around in the sky some incredibly high but starting to come down closer and finally coming in low to land.

With a few raptors around the flocks gathered into tight groups and circled around and around in huge numbers.

Grasshoppers that the Oriental Pratincole were feeding on in plague proportions.

The pratincole after hawking insects high, and avoiding predators started coming into roost and landing in the tussocky grasslands of Roebuck Plains.

A closer shot of the thousands of pratincole coming into roost

Once the sun was setting the birds left what we thought would be the roost site and heded out low over the grassland hawking for insects like nightjar.

Saturday, 6 March 2010

The kids are in Town !

Nest site of Australasian pipit out on the plains

Australiasian Pipit chick- there are three in there honest !

Bnading three Australiasin Pipit chicks

Nik ringing a Paperbark Flycatcher chick

Paperbark Flycatcher chick in its delicate nest woven from spiders webs and grass decorated with bits of leaves.

Paperbark Flycatcher nest quite exposed but blends in perfectly with the branches of the Mother-in-law tree.

And there is the little fella - all head and no tail yet !

All the chicks are really showing up around the site now, this Rurouf Whistler juvenile turned up in the nets.

As did the Rufous Throated Honey eater juvenile - no rufous throat although some adults do not have a coloured throat either, but this is in lovely soft fresh plumage and has a beautiful grey head.

Rufous Throated Honeyeater chicks in the nest

Incredible nest of a Rufous Throated Honeyeater suspended at the end of a spindly branch.

Saturday, 20 February 2010

A week in South West Australia seeking skulkers!

Matt and i decided that we would go to South Australia to see if we could catch up with three impossible to see birds!
Noisy Scrub bird
Western Bristlebird
Western Whipbird

Matt had already left the obs so i flew down to Perth to meet him and joined up at Perry and Alma Reberia's to borrow their camper van and drive South down the Albany highway to Cheynes beach camp site.

Soon after settling in with a cup of tea at Cheynes Beach, we heard Noisy Scrub bird singing in the scrub not just on the other side of the camp sire boundary ! A quick dash and we could pin point where it was singing but could we see the bird??!! it took over half an hour before Matt caught a glimpse and another quarter hour before the bird in question hopped across the track into the low open branches of a young eucalyptus give reasonable views. Great one of the three under our belt within a couple of hours of arriving, the others must surely fall tomorrow!

Was i wrong! despite hearing many singing both bristlebird and whipbird remain invisible in the dense heathland and scrubby area. Chasing them didn't help they just moved low in the scrub to a new position and sang at us !

While waiting not all was lost, we saw Southern Emu Wren with incredibly long fluffy tails, Red Winged Fairy Wren, Spotted and Swamp Harrier, tons of White-Cheeked and New Holland Honeyeater, Purple-Crowned Lorikeet but not a flick of a wing of the target species!

Finally, after two days listening to scrub singing, we left and went to Little beach car park at Two Peoples Bay which is where Noisy Scrub bird was rediscovered after it was thought to be extinct in the late 1800's. We didn't see scrub bird here but we did manage to get Western Bristlebird after a struggle in rain and wind, one eventually obliged by half flying flopping across the road to the traffic island, sang on one side and flopped across to the scrub again. So that was that, we decided we wouldn't get better views and decided to give up on whipbird as the weather was deteriorating and we were due to drive up to Dryandra National Park which would be a good few hours away with a detour to see Western Corrella.

White-cheeked Honeyeater

Driving out of Cheynes Beach up onto the plateau, the scene is open heath with these strange Tree ferns/sedges?

Another stunning flower but no idea what it is yet !

Southern Bandicoot visited us in the campsite and showed no fear at all as it rooted through our rubbish and almost ran up my leg !

Another common marsupial, Western Grey Kangaroo where in the coastal heath and also around the campsites.

Arriving at Dryandra National Park, we camped at the official campsite and found we had parked up under a Brush tailed possum nest. Two climbed down the tree at dusk and wandered around us looking for food.

Another night creature came to visit, a Short-beaked Echidna, which as soon as approached either run away or roll up so you can't see a thing of them apart from spines !

These engaging birds were literally everywhere and a favorite of mine - Rufous Treecreeper, more like a Nuthatch in behaviour but they were quite happy foraging on the ground as well as on dead fallen tree trunks as well as upright trees.

This is the kind of forest that occurs at Dryandra, but there are also plantations of trees for tanin, but when the market fell out of tanin the plantations were just left to mature and now provide a reasonable habitat in the total forest area.