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.