On the water front ...

Week's showers reflooded Tyto reedbeds and brought Wood Sandpiper (Tringa glareola) in yesterday: first small wader for many months.

Same reeds, less peaceful some days ago: Intermediate Egrets (Ardea intermedia) squabble over territory.

Intermediates have enviable strike rate, but no luck this time.

Comb-crested Jacana (Irediparra gallinacea) looks for slower-moving prey. 

And Pacific Heron (Ardea pacifica) stands above the fray.
Click pix to enlarge

Golden Plover gilds wader watch

Pacific Golden Plover (Pluvialis fulva) only wader of rare note in or near Tyto through year to date. Not so hard to find up and down the coast, but this solo bird popped into view on Wednesday just beyond the wetlands' westernmost point, on regreening burnt grass alongside young sugar cane. (I was looking for quail.) Plover unfortunately took lead from two Masked Lapwings it was with and would not settle close enough for better pictures.

Then, 100mm of rain overnight and following day. No sign of bird since.

But two more common wader species have dropped in on newly flooded areas. Bit like buses. None for a while and then three turn up! (New Scientist explained why buses do this. Nothing to do with birds in threes.) Anyway, Sharp-tailed Sandpiper (Calidris acuminata) trio above could pass as triplets.

Wood Sandpipers (Tringa glareola) not so strikingly alike. Striking enough merely to have three of the often solitary birds so close together. One bird has been the regular daily ration for most of the month. Below, a closeup look at a Wood, taken at a nearby treatment pond.

Distant, is what they are

Not a great fan of distant birding. I've never possessed a decent telescope. And far-off birds don't mean a lot when photographed.

But distant pictures may help tell a story or two. Take these two Black-necked Storks. Carrying across the reed flats yesterday morn came a plaintive little call - to put it unkindly, a whining 'peeee, pee-pee, youoooo'.

I surveyed all likely areas for the 'small bird' source. Nothing. Finally realised it was standing 60 or so metres in front of me. The juvenile Jabiru was begging. Didn't do it any good. The female above marched distantly straight by the youngster and left it to fend for itself. Fair enough, too. It's long past need of babying. 

Can't say I've heard the like before. That said, my hearing, though still sharp enough, isn't matched by good aural memory. Bird songs and calls often fool me.

And here's another bird about 60 metres away. It's a male Little Bittern (dead centre: don't strain eyes too much!) at the edge of a Scleria (razor grass) island in the main lagoon at Tyto today.

The bird launched from one island and alighted on another. Four minutes later it flew into grass and weeds on a one-paperbark island. Soon after it flew back into the Scleria. And then it retraced the way it originally came and plonked down out of sight.

Four relatively extended sightings of the chocolatey-custardy back of the bittern, and not a single blurred in-flight shot! It's frustrating, trying to photograph distant bitterns. On the other hand, I've never had a string of four flights before.

To make up for such long-range views, here's a closer look at a Wood Sandpiper, taken yesterday near the Jabirus, from a distance, but without too much camera shake (shooting at 1/2000sec). The bird was alone, as usual. Most Woods appear to prefer to remain apart from others of their species. Distant, is what they are.    

Luck's spotty, like the birds

Luck's been spotty with birds spotted in the distance. Didn't even know the Nankeen Night Heron (Nycticorax caledonicus) disappearing fast from view at Tyto today was a spotty juvenile till I downloaded the images. From distance the bird looked a somewhat drab adult.

Pheasant Coucal (Centropus phasianinus), in black and brown breeding plumage, is more streaked than spotted, and more often spotted running along the ground looking - as in Judith Wright's marvellous set of bird poems - like a granny tripping along tiptoe with skirts up.

Difficult to catch these crafty birds in clear view, on boughs or in the air. They almost invariably clamber high within a tree and launch themselves out the other side away from perceived danger. Their flight is not so clumsy as often described.

Though from the cuckoo family, it's hard to see much about them that other cuckoos would admire. Pheasant Coucals build their own ground nests, incubate the eggs, feed the young, and generally behave like good bird parents.

If they stopped eating other birds' eggs and young all would be happy. I guess they won't and will continue to be mobbed as relentlessly as, say, Blue-winged Kookaburras and Little Eagles.

Spotted close to the long-deserted nest, the quicksilver pair of Lovely Fairy-Wrens. As ever, they flashed across a track, spent a split-second in lantana close to their decaying nest, and disappeared into thick tangles of more lantana and guavas. But I will get them!

Also spotted from distance - and genuinely spotty - this Wood Sandpiper (Tringa glareola), at the mill treatment ponds yesterday evening. We played a wee game of see-if-the-photographer-falls-in-the-scum-chasing-the-bird-beside-the-pond - and declared it a 0-0 draw: no top shots of bird, no muddy feet for me. Meantime, the mystery dark sandpiper of last week was nowhere to be seen.


And here's a biggie to finish. The best-conditioned, thickest Amethyst Python (Morelia amethistina) I've yet seen in Tyto. About 3.5 metres of muscular, shimmering gorgeousness, so heavy it left deep grooves in the shortish wet grass. Perfection! Until it came to keeping its tongue in frame and itself out in the open.

What do you say to an almost 12-foot snake as it goes by? So long! What else could you say?

Spot you later, as they say.


An afterword: Problems with downloading pictures, formats that kept changing, and supposedly lost internet connections added at least an hour to posting this blog. Do others strike similar posts or days? It's maddening to space everything perfectly, introduce another image and find spacing's gone haywire and font and type size has changed. Happens whether I paste stuff in or enter it directly.

Wading into the smugness

See me smiling? It's the ugly mug of the smug gloater. We would-be Nostradamuses don't pay too much attention to the odd failure. But just hear us crow about our successes!

I was a few days out with my small-waders-here-by-November. Better early than late, I say. Get on with it, I hear you say?

Didn't spot the bird hidden by reeds in the shallows today till a passing Little Egret took my eye. And led it to a Wood Sandpiper (Tringa glareola). The birds that visit Tyto are usually loners. They may stick around for months and can become almost as approachable as the more gregarious Sharp-taileds (yet to appear in Tyto but plenty nearby).

A shrill call from a more distant area of reeds revealed one of two Marsh Sandpipers (Tringa stagnatalis) wheeling low over the shallows, and landing again in the ankle-deep water.

The tall birds, much daintier than the lookalike but bigger Common Greenshank, will grow in numbers till the shallows evaporate.

Now, where are the plovers, stints and godwits?

Further to yesterday's talk of killing tulip trees, here's a bird today making use of the flowers - for the colour. The scrap of flower closely matches the excited Red-backed Fairy-Wren's (Malurus melanocephalus) glowing colour. The offering is intended to attract a female. Red berries are also used. Without conspicuous success in either case, from what I've seen!