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Monday, 4 November, 2013

 

Today was my last day of birding on this trip.  Tomorrow I start the long journey home.

 

I slept in today, getting up at 5:45, the latest on the trip.  At this point, getting up later is probably a good thing for me, as I am going to have a very long day on Wednesday, and I don’t need to be up early tomorrow or Wednesday.  I’ll try to stay up a little later tonight.  Last night I made it until almost 9, but I was out on my feet, so I went to bed.  I’m a confirmed night person, so this early schedule is really different for me.

 

I had only a handful of possible new trip birds to look for today, and none of them were very likely.  I decided to spend my time seeing a couple of places I have read about but never visited, and along the way, I would make my best effort to get a new trip bird.  My first destination was Mowbray National Park.  National Park has a completely different meaning over here, compared to home.  Any park that is owned by the national government is a National Park, and there are hundreds of them, if not thousands.  They can be very small, and they don’t necessarily even have any facilities.  I found my way to this part of Mowbray National Park with a map that they had given me here at Kingfisher Park.  There were no signs along the way, and there was no sign when I got there to indicate that the track leading off into the rainforest was public property, let alone a National Park.  The track was too narrow and too deep in the forest to interest me.  If I had heard anything or seen anything, I wouldn’t have been able to chase it because the vegetation was so dense.  It was maybe an interesting place to hike, if you liked rainforests, but I didn’t see any attraction to me.  I did play the call of the Shining Bronze-Cuckoo there, as well as everywhere else I went today when it was suitable habitat (rainforest), but I never saw or heard any response, all day long.

 

I made my way across the countryside near Julatten, stopping when I saw something of interest.  At one of my stops, I was playing the bronze-cuckoo call, I think, when I heard the sound of wings above me.  I looked up and there was a Spotted Catbird sitting out in the open on a branch.  I had had a very brief, very poor view of one on Mount Lewis the other day with David, and I had wanted a better look.  Well, I got it today, as the bird sat there and posed for several minutes.  It had a mouthful of fruit of some kind, which made me think that it was taking the food back to a nest.

 

If I wasn’t going to see any new trip birds, at least I could still get pictures that I like.  Here is a picture of the Julatten countryside, which was mostly farms or cattle.

 

I spotted a raptor on a post, but it was only another Black Kite, which has been the commonest raptor on the trip, by far.  I can’t resist taking a picture of a perched raptor, though, so here is another Black Kite.

 

It has a lot of color on it for a bird called a Black Kite, if you ask me.

 

A little later I saw a bird perched on top of a dead snag, and it turned out to be a raptor, too, one I had not expected to see up here.  I had only seen one Black-shouldered Kite on the whole trip, and that was from the train when I was still in Sydney, on my way to meet some guys to bird in the Blue Mountains.  I got very distant pictures of it.

 

 

It looks just like our White-tailed Kite, and I have an affection for the White-tailed Kite.

 

Back on the main road, there was a Forest Kingfisher sitting on a wire.  I have seen them a number of times, but I think this is my first picture of one.

 

The blue was striking in the morning sun.

 

So, having done the area to the east of Kingfisher Park, I headed to the west.  On my way to my next destination I stopped in Mt Molloy to check on the Brown Goshawk on the nest, but only the tail was showing, just like yesterday.  I was heading for Lake Mitchell, which I had driven by a couple of times, but I had not stopped there.  There is a causeway that goes across the lake, and I have read about it, but I had never driven out on it.  To get there you have to go through this gate:

 

Again, there was no sign at all to indicate it was public property, but the map from Kingfisher Park showed it, and I have read about birding there, too.  You can sort of see in that picture that there has been a fire this season, and it was blackened all the way to the lake, along the road.  It is about a kilometer down that road to another gate, on the other side of the lake, and it is private property after that.  I guess this is a public road, to give those people access to their property.  Here is what it looks like from the other end, looking back toward the highway.

 

The lake is on both sides of the causeway.  There were a lot of water birds there, and I took some pictures.  I had faint hopes of seeing Cotton Pygmy-goose, as there had been a report of six of them on October 1.  There were 4 or 5 more recent reports in October, and none of them mentioned Cotton Pygmy-goose, though, so I wasn’t optimistic.  There were some Green Pygmy-geese, though, and I got this picture of a female and a male, with the female on the left.

 

Here are some Magpie Geese.

 

Here is a picture of two more Magpie Geese.

 

This is an Australasian Grebe in non-breeding plumage.

 

There was a Comb-crested Jacana working the area, and even though I showed better pictures before, I find them to be an attractive bird, so here is another one.

 

There were lots of coots around, and also lots of Black Swans.  For some reason, wherever there was a group of swans, there were coots around them.  I wonder why.

 

It must have something to do with food, unless the swans provide protection for the coots from raptors.

 

Here are a couple of pictures of Lake Mitchell, taken from the causeway.

 

 

Earlier in the trip, I showed pictures of a Darter, a cormorant family bird that has a very long neck.  I mentioned that they sometimes swim underwater and just stick their head up to look around (and breathe, I suppose).  It is like the periscope on a submarine, as the head just rises out of the water and then sinks again a little later.  Here is a picture of a Darter playing at being a submarine with its periscope up.

 

I saw Wandering Whistling-Ducks in two places, but both groups were too far away for pictures.  It was fun doing some actual birding, as opposed to just playing calls and hoping to see one particular species.  I enjoyed taking pictures, too.  I was also glad to see the causeway at Lake Mitchell, as I have read about it for years.  I had been by it twice before, in 2002 and 2008, but had never stopped there.

 

It was getting on for lunch time by then, and I was hungry.  On my way back I stopped again to check out the Brown Goshawk nest, but still only the tail was showing.  As I was going back to my car after taking a look, I heard some strange bird calls that I didn’t recognize, and three Red-tailed Black-Cockatoos flew over.  I had seen them and gotten good pictures to the west of Townsville a couple or three weeks ago, and I had seen one the other day on my way back from Yungaburra.  I snapped a quick photo, and although it isn’t very good, it does show the bird well enough to identify it.

 

I made one more stop to try for Shining Bronze-cuckoo, but again got no response.  Back at “home”, I had some tuna and mayo on rolls, with some potato chips and a Diet Coke, for my humble lunch.  I worked on the pictures from this morning, and then I went up to the office to ask Keith, the owner, about a bird he had written about in his blog.  While waiting for him, I got this picture of a couple of Red-browed Finches at one of the feeders.

 

Here is a Bar-shouldered Dove underneath the feeder, eating seeds.

 

Yesterday, Keith had told me where to look for this bird I wanted to see, but I couldn’t find the hole it was supposed to be in.  It is a night bird, and during the day it roosts in a hole.  This afternoon he took me over there and showed me where to look.  It was unlikely the bird would be showing, but evidently they do wake up and come out during the day sometimes, so I wanted to know where the hole was, so I could check it out a couple of times.

 

We got to the place where you could observe it, and I had a hard time following his instructions on where to look in the maze of trees, to see the hole.  I had a sense of urgency, because he said the bird was at the edge of the hole, and you could see it.  Before I could find the hole, he said it went back in.  Bummer.  Finally I found the hole, and the little darling came out again, and I added AUSTRALIAN OWLET-NIGHTJAR (lifer) to my trip list.  I was very pleased, as you might imagine.  I took some pictures and came back to my room to look at them.  You could sort of see it was a bird, but they weren’t really very good, maybe not good enough to identify the bird, even, if you didn’t know what it was ahead of time.  The main problem was motion blur, which I keep talking about.  It is impossible to hand hold a camera steady enough at 50X zoom to get a sharp picture.

 

So, I got out my scope on the tripod and the plate to attach my camera to the tripod, and I went back over.  Keith had shown me two vantage points from which to see the hole.  One was closer, but the other had a better view, straight into the hole.  I set up at the more distant view point, and took this picture of the empty hole.

 

Then I waited.  I didn’t have to wait very long, as it turned out.  I soon saw the bird come to the edge of the hole.  The first picture I took shows the bird a little way back in the hole still, and its eyes seem to be open.

 

Is he a little cutie, or what?  My later pictures showed him farther out of the hole, but with his eyes closed, as he dozed away the day, waiting for the night, so he could go out and catch bugs or whatever he does at night.

 

Using my tripod with my camera made a huge difference, as I knew it would.  For the last pictures I took, I used the timer delay to shoot them, and that is even better, since just pressing the shutter button will set up vibrations in the camera that can cause some blur.  To add to my challenge in getting pictures, the wind was blowing, which had two negative effects.  First, wind will shake the tripod, and second, the wind kept blowing branches in front of the bird.  I’m quite pleased with the results, though, as I was a long way away from the bird.

 

So, that was the bang-up ending to my trip that I had been hoping for.  On my last day of birding, one more trip bird, and a lifer to boot.  That brings me to 359 species on the trip, of which 34 are lifers.  As a reminder, I had been hoping for 300 species and 21 lifers.  It has been an incredibly successful trip, in every way.  The only way it could get better would be for the Buff-breasted Paradise-Kingfisher to finally show up tomorrow morning, before I leave.  That is unlikely in the extreme, but birders live on hope, and it gives me something to hope for.  Not that I need anything more to hope for; it has been an outstanding trip, and I don’t need anything more.

 

I’ve gone on and on about the heat, and it was hot again today.  While I was working on my pictures this afternoon, it hit 88 F here in my room, which was not very comfortable for me.  It is 6 PM now, and it is down to a much more comfortable 78.  It was 68 in the room this morning, which is downright cold compared to what I have been experiencing lately.  It is not humid up here at this elevation (about 1400 feet), and that helps a lot.  I don’t have air conditioning here, remember.  I think this has been the only place I stayed on the trip that didn’t have a/c.

 

Tomorrow I start the long journey home.  I have a flight booked to Sydney from Cairns, and I’ll see if I can put out a brief report from Sydney for tomorrow, even if it doesn’t actually get out until the next morning.  I have a room booked at a Sydney airport hotel for tomorrow night.  I can’t resist saying it, although I know I overdo it.  What a life!