The Warrumbungles

After doing some wonderful relaxed birding at Capertee, we headed another 3 hours further north-west to the town of Coonabarabran near the Warrumbungles National Park. An interesting note, Coonabarabran is known as the astronomy capital of Australia, with lots of homes having white telescope domes in their yards or on hilltops!

The Warrumbungles is a rugged area of ancient volcanic vent plugs of solid lava, where the original volcano has eroded away. A good area for birding, but again we were a bit unlucky with lots of wind and rain in the area, but we did see 67 bird species.

One of the birds we were after was the Glossy Black-Cockatoo which is fairly common in the she-oak forest area called Pilliga, just to the north-west of the Warrumbungles, but due to the massive overnight rain most roads were flooded and the forest tracks were far too boggy. Oh well, next time.

On a track just out of Capertee, we came across this Eastern Bearded Dragon (Pogona barbata) trying to get warm in the cold conditions.

A great looking lizard and a new reptile species for us.

Capertee Valley NSW

We have just returned from our birding holiday in New South Wales with 119 seen species in total and 15 new life species for me and 14 for Liz. Not bad seeing that the weather turned out to be cold, wet and windy for most of the 8 birding days we had. We heard a lot more bird species, but the rules of our birding trips are that the species must be seen well enough to be IDed.

Our first part of the holiday was going to be spent in the Capertee Valley about 2 hours drive west of Sydney. Due to bad traffic it took 2 hours just to get out of the Sydney area, so it was well after dark on a cold, wet stormy night when we arrived. This was the beautiful, but wet sunrise that greeted us the next day.

It may have been wet, but still a lovely morning to go birding around our cottage.

Oskas Cottage is a wonderful place to stay with great birding just out your back door at the base of Mt Sentinal.

Our hire car is cover by thick layers of mud, after the slippery wet drive into Capertee the night before.

The roads into Capertee are unsealed but generally good when dry, but the night we came in, the pale clay had turned into a slippery sticky mud and a number of times we came close to getting bogged or sliding off the road!

The Capertee is a special place for getting two sort-after NSW bird species, the Regent Honeyeater and Turquoise Parrot. It's a great place for a lot of other birds too, despite the wet weather we managed to see 83 species.

A creek with she-oaks which is a habitat of Glossy Black-Cockatoo. We didn't get them, but saw a beautiful yellow and green Eastern Crested Shrike-Tit.

Cold but happy! A walk at the back of the cottage near the hayshed got us the NSW endemic Rockwarbler and a pair of Turquoise Parrots.

We found no Regent Honeyeaters, as it seems that this season the trees it feeds on aren't flowering yet. The honeyeaters are endangered, in low numbers and nomadic so getting them is always a callenge!

The Capertee Valley is a beautiful place and one we hope to go back to one day, especially for Regent Honeyeater.

NT Birding

We are back from Darwin and the NT after a full on birding holiday, 4 new lifers - Red Goshawk, Hooded Parrot, Large-tailed Nightjar & Masked Finch. We recorded 123 bird species, basically in 5 days.

We first headed for the small old mining town of Pine Creek, about 200 km south of Darwin to look for our main target, Hooded Parrots.

No luck at town, even the local haunt of Copperfield Dam had no

Hooded Parrots.

A lone Yellow-bellied Flycatcher watchs our quest.       

 

We stay for a few days at Katherine and searched lovely pandanus-lined creeks at Edith Falls for parrots

 and hopefully our other target the Red Goshawk, but no luck.

The wonderful Katherine Gorge also didn't have out targets, but 

at Mataranka we did get our Red Goshawk.                               

The last possible morning for our Hooded Parrot quest found us

up well before dawn to travel the one hour back to Pine Creek.

We scanned the Water Gardens.................and finally got them!

This was our wonderful Hooded Parrots target.            

We saw a beautiful gold-winged male and his female.       

  

Only hours before our flight home, we stopped at the Darwin Botanic Garden to look for the local Rufous Owl there, but the only owl we found was this metal one!

Australian Brush-Turkey

We are off to Darwin tomorrow for some birding. The kitchen downlights are in and work and look great! Now it time to pack and charge up the photo/video gear. Hopefully I might get some footage, but this trip is more of a hunt for birds we missed last time, so it's going to be full on!
Our target lifer birds are:

Hooded Parrot
Red Goshawk
Northern Shrike-Tit
Large-tailed Nightjar
Masked Finch
Chestnut-backed Button-Quail
Red-chested Button-Quail
Red-backed Button-Quail
White-breasted Whistler (for Liz)


Here is a video of a Brush-Turkey from our last trip up near Cairns in Queenland. He didn't seem to care how close we got, as he was so busy looking for food in the rainforest leaf litter.

Lots of Work - House not Fauna

I've been so busy lately, not with fauna work which has been a bit slow this year, but house renovations. We have decided we are staying in our house for the next few years, so lots of work needs to be done, work we put off for far too long (by going on birding holidays)!

One bathroom fully renovated with new floor and wall tiles, new cabinet, mirror, taps etc.....

Not a job I want to do again in a hurry (hate cutting tiles)!

Current project 1 - Scrape old ceiling paint off (that's with a small razor), install new downlights, fix ceiling and re-paint!

Current project 2 - Remove old broken (broken by tree-loppers) wooden fence, clear brick retaining wall and have new metal fence put up. Work left to do - New patio and paving, new backyard landscaping, install roof insulation, build carport, painting, more tiling etc........

We are off to Darwin on Saturday for a birding holiday.............oops, the house may have to wait a little longer. I better go and finish wiring those downlights!

Australian Bustards

Last Christmas during our travels in north Queensland, we went to an area to the east of Cairns near Mt Carbine. This area is called Maryfarms and is well known as one of the best places in Australia to see Australian Bustards. We saw at least a dozen bustards in about a 5 km section of track.

Here is a video of a couple of them.

More Music from SaReGaMa

Here is some more of the wonderful relaxing music of SaReGaMa. My ipod is full of his music, that's great to relax to and use as wildlife video music.
For those interested, free downloads can be found at  http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/saregama and at his blog site http://saregama-music.blogspot.com/





SaReGaMa - Aquarius
Uploaded by Triplexity.




Here are the answers to the 'What are these????' puzzle. Thanks for having a go guys and some good guesses. Some of you got the seed pod, but the rest were tricky. These are some of the usual plant and animal body parts I find when I sift through the soil under a microscope looking for snail shell fragments.