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Monday, 21 October, 2013

 

Wow, it was another great day of birding in the land of Oz for the Old Rambler.  I was up at 5 and was out of here by 6:30.  I drove the half hour out to the Old Flinders Highway near the town of Woodstock.  I had been there before in 2008, but I had forgotten how big the area around there is.

 

My first stop was at the horse place out there.  I parked and was seeing some birds, and a woman came along and was setting a sprinkler to water the grass, and I had a short conversation with her.  She ended up telling me I could come into the grounds to look for birds.

 

I did that, and there were some birds around.  I got GREAT BOWERBIRD easily, for my trip list, but it was too shy for pictures.  There have been tons of Black Kites all over the place on this trip, and I thought a couple of them were flying around overhead.  I snapped a couple of pictures, because I always like to get pictures of flying raptors, but when I looked at the pictures, I decided this one was a Whistling Kite.  I hope I’m not displaying my ignorance again; I freely admit that I am terrible with Aussie raptors.

 

Eventually I did spot the birds the woman had told me about, and I added CHESTNUT-BREASTED MANNIKIN to my trip list.  I had only seen them once before, on my 2008 trip, so I was pleased to get them, and I even got this picture.  It isn’t a native bird, I don’t think.  The current population came from escapees or released birds.  I think it is an Asian species.

 

After a while, I moved on from there, and the next one I chalked up was BLUE-WINGED KOOKABURRA.  Here is a picture of that one.

 

The Laughing Kookaburra has blue on its wings, too, but it has a black streak through the eye, and the Blue-winged one doesn’t.  That was three for the list; it was already a good day.

 

I saw a couple of large black birds in a field, and I first thought “crows”, but they seemed larger than crows, so I put my binoculars on them.  RED-TAILED BLACK-COCKATOO was added to my list.  I got distant pictures of those first two, but later got better and closer looks at others.  Here is a male Red-tailed Black-Cockatoo.

 

He has that bright red-orange color on his tail.  The female has spots on her, has a lighter colored bill, and has more of a yellow orange color on her tail.

 

Here is a picture of the dry habitat in the area.  It hasn’t rained significantly for a couple of months, and that isn’t characteristic of this area.

 

I wasn’t driving on that track; I was on paved roads the whole time.

 

I drove along the roads and kept my eyes peeled.  There were a surprising number of birds around, considering how dry everything was.  I was looking for a particular finch, but never found it.  I had Double-barred Finch and Zebra Finch, though.  Not ones I needed for my trip list, but good birds to see.  The next one to be added was PHEASANT COUCAL.  I had only seen this large cuckoo once before, and that was a quick look as I was driving by.  This one sat at the top of a small tree for me, but the light was bad, and this was the best picture I could get.

 

Here is one I call peek-a-boo Pheasant Coucal; it shows his colors a little better.

 

So, that was number five for the day, and I was feeling good.  As I was driving along I saw a small flock of birds fly up, and damned if they didn’t turn out to be BUDGERIGARS, which is the actual name of the species that Americans call parakeets.  I hadn’t expected them this far east, and after missing them at Bowra, I had given up on seeing them on this trip.  Here are some pictures.

 

 

I call this last one “Budgies on branches”.  Aussies call these little beauties budgies.

 

So, number six for the day was one I had given up on; excellent!

 

I continued to drive and look, and I saw a brown bird fly into a tree as I approached.  I got a picture, and after looking at my field guide, I think it is a female BROWN SONGLARK.  As usual, I am open to correction when I get a call wrong.

 

One of the features of the landscape was towers of dirt.  I think they are termite mounds, and here is a picture of one of the biggest ones I saw today.

 

They don’t do things by half over here in Oz, and termites are powerful over here in the outback.

 

There was a perched raptor, and I took some pictures.  I think it is a first year Black Kite, which is lighter colored than the mature ones.

 

 

There was a Blue-winged Kookaburra showing off its bright blue rump.

 

Next I added GOLDEN-HEADED CISTICOLA to my trip list.  You might remember that there was some question about the two cisticolas I showed pictures of a few days ago.  At this point, I’m going to leave those two birds as unknown and add Golden-headed to my list today, based on this bird.

 

 

A little walk down a track got me this picture of a female Red-winged Parrot.

 

There was a group of 5 or 6 of them, males and females.

 

All this time, it had been showering from time to time.  I would be chasing a bird, and the sprinkles or the drizzle would start, and I would retreat to the car.  I had been out there for about 3 ½ hours by then, so I headed back toward home.  On the way, I got this picture of a Masked Lapwing, a common bird that I don’t think I have shown a picture of before, this year.

 

The subspecies of the bird that lives south of here doesn’t have such big yellow wattles on its face.  I always think this species looks goofy.  To me, they look like gentlemen dressed up in fancy clothes, wearing a goofy mask.

 

On my way back to town (I was about 20 or 25 miles to the west of Townsville when I was birding), I stopped at Oak Valley, but I couldn’t find the birding area, and it was raining anyway, so I just drove around a little and headed back to town.  I drove to the mouth of the Ross River, which is where the Port of Townsville is.  I was looking for shorebirds, but the tide was much too high, and I saw nothing.  I drove back to my humble motel and was there about noon.  I had eaten my home made lunch as I drove back to town.

 

I had made arrangement with a local birder by the name of Ian to go out this afternoon and look for an owl that would be a lifer for me.  I used the middle of the day to process my pictures from this morning (the ones you have seen so far), and I was ready to go when Ian picked me up at 2:30.

 

He took me somewhere in a residential area where they had left patches of original habitat, to look for these two owls that had been hanging around the area for some weeks.  We looked up in the trees, and walked down by the creek, always looking up for the owls.  Ian saw an owl fly away, and one of us spotted an owl that was perched in a tree.  It was a recently fledged, very fuzzy, RUFOUS OWL (lifer).  Here is a picture of that little beauty.

 

Ian hadn’t even known that there was a young owl in the area.  He had reckoned that the owls were roosting in the area, but he didn’t know they had been nesting there.  It was very exciting for both of us.  We moved on, looking for an adult bird.  I think I spotted it first, an adult Rufous Owl.

 

How cool it that?  Not only the baby one, but one of the parents as well.  But wait, there’s more.  Next we spotted the second adult.  We both agreed it was a different bird than we had seen before, as it was lighter in color.  Here is that one.

 

We were really happy about that.  We went back up to the top of the gully, and walked along to see if we could see any of the birds from a higher vantage point.  Well, we not only found the recently fledged bird, there was a second one in the same view!  Incredible.  Here is a picture of two fledgling Rufous Owls.  They are looking at Ian, who had moved off to my right.

 

They looked back at me when Ian moved back toward me.

 

This was really something special.  Here is a picture of Ian shooting the baby owls.

 

Note that he has a real camera, as opposed to my little toy point-and-shoot camera.  Here is a picture of Townsville birder Ian.

 

So, we tore ourselves away from that excitement and moved on.  Ian could hear White-browed Robins calling, but we couldn’t see one.  We will try again tomorrow.  He then drove us to the Townsville Common, a huge reserve adjacent to the city, which has the largest reported bird list in Queensland.  There is normally a lot of water there, but in this dry period, the water has dwindled away to almost nothing.  A big fire swept through there recently, too, and there was a lot of damage.

 

At one of our stops, he was able to get me on to a BROWN-BACKED HONEYEATER, though.  There was a hanging nest, and the bird was going to the nest repeatedly, presumably feeding young.  Here is a picture of the Brown-backed Honeyeater at its hanging nest.

 

Next were some pictures of Crimson Finches.  I had shown my peek-a-boo picture of one yesterday, and the strange head-on view of one, but this time I got good profile shots of both a male and a female.  Here is the male Crimson Finch.

 

And here is the less colorful female.

 

Ian needed to get home, so we headed back toward my motel.  On the way there were a couple of BLACK-NECKED STORKS for my trip list, though, as well as a couple of large cranes called BROLGAS.  Wow, the numbers were adding up.  As we were leaving the Common, I asked Ian to stop and back up, and we got out to see a WHITE-BELLIED-CUCKOO-SHRIKE, a common bird here, but another one for my list.  My final trip list bird for the day was PIED IMPERIAL-PIGEON, a bird I will see in Cairns for sure, but they are here too, I guess.

 

So, that had been a whopping 14 for my trip list, and the Rufous Owl was a lifer.  What a difference it makes to move into a whole new part of the country, Far North Queensland.  That’s why I drove for three days, to get up here where the birds are somewhat different.  I should mention that this afternoon it was sunny and hot, with no sign of the showers I had experienced just 20 miles to the west in the morning.  That puts me at 294 for the trip, of which 25 are lifers.  Amazing.

 

Tomorrow Ian is going to pick me up at 6:30 and we will see what else we can find for me.  I got the idea that he would have started even earlier, but 6:30 is about as early as the Old Rambler can handle, I’m afraid.  We’ll see what tomorrow can bring.