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Saturday, 26 October, 2013

 

Not a very exciting day today.  I barely averted the skunk, and I don’t have many pictures that I like much, either.  Still, it was a day of rambling around Australia, and that is a wonderful thing, so I’m not complaining.

 

I was up before 5.  Sorry to keep harping on my rising time, but I am a night person, and it has been a real victory to keep to such an early schedule on this trip.  I have only used an alarm 3 or 4 times at the most, and even then, I think I woke before the alarm went off some of the time.  Birding is much better in the morning when the birds first get up and need to eat after the long night of no food.  I have two more early commitments next week, too, so I need to keep to it for the rest of the way.

 

I’m staying in the Atherton Tablelands, and it is supposed to be a really great place to bird, but I have to say, for me, it is vastly over-rated.  There are some remnant rainforests, but I do terribly in rainforests; at least I do when I’m alone.  Most of the birds I can see here can be seen other places, too.  I had considered staying three nights here, but I’m glad I made it only two.

 

My first stop this morning was Hastie’s Swamp again, the place I had seen the Wandering Whistling-duck yesterday afternoon.  I got this picture of some Pink-eared Ducks feeding in a group.

 

Personally, I would have named them Zebra Ducks, because of the stripes on their sides, but the name refers to the tiny bit of pink behind the eye, where an ear would be if a duck had an ear, which I suppose it does.  Here is a closeup shot, and if you look very closely, you should be able to see the tiny pink spot that gives them their name.

 

You really have to see the duck well to see the pink “ear”.

 

There were again thousands of Plumed Whistling-Ducks there.  Here is one raft of them in the morning sun.  I think there must be 800 or 1000 in that group, and that was only one group of them.

 

I saw a Latham’s Snipe on the bank, and I got some pictures.  There wasn’t much light, so that is my excuse for the quality of this picture.

 

Something looks wrong with the head in that shot.  It seems to be doubled or split or something, on top.  I have another picture that looks the same.  I don’t get it, but there is my best picture of a Latham’s Snipe.

 

Yesterday afternoon I had been pleased to pick out one Wandering Whistling-Duck among the couple of thousand Plumed Whistling Ducks.  This morning I counted six Wanderers, and I’m sure there were a lot more.  Here is a picture of one of them, in the poor morning light.

 

If you compare the duck in the middle of the picture (the Wandering Whistling-Duck) with the Plumed Whistling-Duck at the lower right, you can see the plumes are much smaller, the leg is black, the top of the head is dark, and the colors are different on the rest of it too.

 

So, after my quick stop at Hastie’s Swamp, I moved on to Wongabel State Forest again.  On my way to the car park, I saw a little bird along the road, and I took about 15 pictures of it from the car, as it hopped around feeding frantically.  It just wouldn’t sit still.  Here is the best I could do of a Yellow-throated Scrubwren, which I had counted there yesterday afternoon.

 

Next I pulled into the car park and got out.  I played the call of Cicadabird, in the hopes one might fly in.  Then I noticed a bird sitting on a post right out in front of me.  I quickly fired up my camera to get a picture, and I snapped off three of them before it flew off.  The light was so poor that all the pictures are crap, but I am going to show one anyway.  I rarely show such a lousy picture, but I think the bird is striking, and it was my only trip bird of the day, as it turned out, GREY-HEADED ROBIN.

 

I hope to get a better pic at some point.

 

I tried for some birds there, with playback, but got nothing.  I moved on up the road to Mt. Hypipamee, where I had seen the Golden Bowerbird yesterday.  I spent a couple of hours there, but I got nothing new at all.  I had vocal responses to some of my playback, but I could never see a bird.  I ran into a couple of Aussie birders there and got some information that might prove helpful, but the bird I needed that they directed me to eluded me.  I did get this picture of a male Australian Brush-turkey.  I have seen them all up the coast, but the picture I showed early in the trip wasn’t very good.

 

The female looks similar except that the yellow thing around the neck is only a collar on the female, while on the male, it hangs down as you see here.  It wobbles back and forth as the bird walks.

 

As I was about to leave Mt. Hypipamee, a couple who had been on the short walk to the crater which is the reason for the park, told me that they had seen a tree kangaroo at the end of the walk.  They gave me directions, and I went to look.  It was about a half mile round trip, I think.  I did find the tree kangaroo, but it didn’t cooperate for pictures.  Here is the best I could do, as it kept its head turned away from me the whole time.

 

I show it because it is the first time I have seen a tree kangaroo in the wild.  While I was waiting for it to turn toward me, I got this picture of a Pied Currawong.

 

So, after that, and after trying for some rainforest birds some more there, I gave it up and headed back to my villa.  I stopped at Wongabel State Forest and tried again, but had no luck again.  I came back here to my villa and had lunch and did some planning.  I didn’t know where to go this afternoon, as the only places worthwhile were rainforests, and I was not doing well in rainforests.  I ended up deciding to head out to Lake Tinaroo, a large reservoir to the north and east of here.  I had seen reports of Tree Martins at a particular place, and I thought I would give them a shot.  Tree Martin is a common bird over here, and no Aussie birder would waste time going to look for them, but I still need them, so I decided to give it a go.  I got to see another place I had never been to, but other than that, nothing.  I ran into more Road Works, and they were actually working on one stretch, on a Saturday.  The other stretch had a set of traffic lights and one lane open, so it delayed me.  On the way back, on that stretch, I saw three Sarus Cranes right next to the road, but I couldn’t stop for pictures because it was only one lane with no place to pull off.  There was a car waiting at the other end, too.  Bummer.  Sarus Crane was the bird I had seen in the distance yesterday at Bromfield Swamp, and I would have liked to get pictures today.

 

As it turned out, I had another chance a little later, when there were two of them fairly near the road.  Here is a picture of the two Sarus Cranes in a newly harvested field.

 

Here is a closer shot of one of them.

 

And here is a closeup of the head.

 

If you compare that to the head of one of the Brolgas I saw a few days ago, you can see the difference.

 

That is an example of the kinds of differences that birders have to be tuned into.  Other than the head markings, the two species are very similar.  I saw two Brolgas this morning at Hastie’s Swamp, and I wish I had gotten a picture of them, as they are the only ones I have seen here on the Tablelands.  I ended up seeing about 40 Sarus Cranes at several locations today, feeding in the fields.  Some of those were actually probably mixed groups of both species, but they were too distant to tell, with the heat haze.

 

I visited the Curtain Fig Tree, which is a tourist thing to do, but there are some good birds reported there, so I went.  I saw no birds, but here is a picture of this strange tree.

 

Fig trees start in a host tree and put down roots that reach the ground eventually, and the host tree eventually dies usually, leaving the fig tree with multiple trunks.  Here is a sign that explains how this particular tree ended up looking like this.

 

You probably can’t read the small print, even if you wanted to for some odd reason, but the pictures tell the story of how the tree developed.  The key thing is that the original host tree fell over at some point and was caught by another tree, so it ended up at a 45 degree angle.  When the host tree died and rotted away, it left the Curtain Fig Tree, leaning on the other tree.

 

It was getting late, and I decided to call it a day.  I was ready to head down off this plateau to some easier birding and some new birds, in and around the city of Cairns.  I did stop one more time at Hastie’s Swamp, since it was on my way.  I ran into the same two Aussie birders whom I had seen at Mt. Hypipamee in the morning, and we chatted some more.  Because of all the research I did before the trip, and also because of my previous trips, as well as because of all the help I have had on this trip, I was able to hold my own in the discussion.  When birders meet in the field, the conversation inevitably turns to “have you seen such and such”, “what did you see at such and such a place”, etc.  I had seen some good birds and had visited some good places on my trip, so I could hold up my end of the conversation.  Again, it was largely thanks to all the help I have had on this trip.

 

So, with that, I called it a day.  Tomorrow I head down the hill to Cairns.  The trip is winding down, and I can feel it.  After tonight here, I have four nights in Cairns, one night in Daintree Village, and a final four nights in Julatten at Kingfisher Park Lodge.  Then I spend three days flying home, stopping overnight in Sydney and Los Angeles on the way home, just to break up the trip and make it easier on my old body.  I have a guy lined up in Cairns who is going to take me out on Monday morning, and he also conducts a bird walk on Tuesday mornings, which he invited me to come along on.  I have a number of species to look for in Cairns, but I’m there for the next four nights, and it remains to be seen if I can get a new trip bird on each and every day.  As the trip winds down, the suspense on whether I will get skunked one day increases.

 

With my one trip bird today, I am now at 320 species, of which 28 are lifers.