The impact of the Dry

As August draws to close and we have now had three months with no rain the impacts of the prolonged dry season can be clearly seen. Earlier this week I went back to Holmes Jungle to find that all the areas of open water have now gone and there was just a small area of liquid mud remaining (which I am sure has now dried up completely). Yesterday I went to Knuckey and the visible difference from when we first arrived is immense.

The red arrow is an approximation of where the water level reached when we first arrived - I had thought that I had taken a picture showing it but have not. You can see from the staining on the galvanized fence in the foreground where the water level can get to during the wet!
From a coastal birders point of view this is good news as it concentrates the birds into one or two favoured sites - although less good for birds in the interior of the continent that have to migrate to the coastal fringes.
The spectacle at Knuckey is getting more impressive each time I visit as more and more birds are coming in.

On a different note my apologies in advance if there are longer gaps between updates in the next few weeks but I am having huge problems with Blogger / Google. In order to open / write  / upload to the blog I have had to change my Internet browser. I am now on my third and today I had problems just logging in to update. I have contacted Google to see if there is an explanation for this but have received no reply. If this continues and blogger stops functioning in my current browser I will look at migrating the blog to a different server, obviously would post link on this blog and send all the new page address. I hope I don't have to do this but we will have to wait and see....

Midweek update

We are settling in to the new school routine now which is that Cameron goes in all day each Monday and Tuesday and then for every Wednesday morning. With Tish's rota this week I had not done any housework as she was off on Monday and Tuesday so did not want to waste time doing housework then. I had saved it all up for Wednesday morning - plus I had to be home as the pool guy was coming to look at what needs to be done (both pumps gone and the leaks are actually us over filling the pool and the water is getting into the spa air bleeds and leaking out that way so nothing to be concerned about). I was most of the way through the cleaning when got a call from the school to say Cameron bless him had vomited everywhere - needless to say cleaning abandoned and youngest son collected!
Within a couple of hours Tish was home - she had done all her home visits and was not feeling too brilliant herself. So by midday the two invalids were both asleep (I think that in all honesty Tish was probably overly tired from her night shifts which coupled with hot and humid days has meant she has not slept well for several days).
I decided ti use this opportunity and headed off the Leanyer Swamp for a couple of hours before picking up Hamish - Xanthe is doing some extra work after school for an inter school competition called the Tournament of Minds (she is one of seven Wulagi students selected by the teachers to represent the school).
I was not expecting too much as it was midday and the days are getting hotter but as the tide was right (high tides mean I can't get to the best bits as it is a tidal mangrove swamp) I thought I would try and see.
I was very pleasantly surprised and got some semi decent pictures of the male Mangrove Golden Whistler..

At the moment there are large numbers of Brolga in the area - it is great to be out birding and hear cranes calling away. They are not easy to get decent pictures of but I do see them flying over quite regularly

Thats all folks as they say. Will probably have a quiet weekend as Cameron not well and Tish back on nights again - considering she is self rostering I think something has gone wrong in the planning stage!

Its getting hotter

The build up has certainly started as it is getting noticably hotter and more humid particularly so at night. That said we still have had no real rain since May but we should start to get the odd shower over the next few weeks. Of course now is the ideal time to use the pool except that it is not fixed yet! They are due to come and sort it Wednesday this week so hopefully next weekend when yes you've guessed it Tish is on nights again, the kids can lounge around in it during the afternoon.
In order to give Tish a chance to get to sleep I took the children out to Knuckey first thing this morning and drove around some of the back roads to see if there was any access to the beach or Shoal Point - there isn't it is all under military control and the roads are blocked off.
The other clear indication that we are getting to the business end of the dry is the increasing numbers of wetland birds at Knuckey - last weekend the most noticable feature was the number of Magpie Geese, this weekend it is the number of egrets, herons and spoonbills that are feeding away with over 70 great white, 25 little, 30 intermediate and 20 cattle egrets as well as 70+ pied heron, 5 white-necked heron, 26 royal spoonbill and five glossy ibis.
Migrant waders from the northern hemisphere are also starting to increase and there were four wood sandpipers at least feeding on the lagoons.
The cute factor was held by the black-fronted dotterel; I have been seeing them most times that I have visited in the last few weeks and the reason for this became obvious when I saw two adults accompanied by little bundles of feathers about third grown.

Apologies for the picture quality but the little blighters never stopped buzzing around!

On the back roads we found several butcherbirds - both silver backed and pied.

The silver backed are obviously starting to breed as they were singing away giving some reasonable photo ops

The pied butcherbird on the other hand seem to have finished breeding as we saw several immatures which are not quite as attractive

To.morrow I am going back to Holmes Jungle first thing to see if I can get to the bottom of what species of cisticola are around at the moment

Book week and sunset

Today was the end of book week and Hamish and Xanthe went in to school in fancy dress as characters from their favourite books.
Hamish went in as a pirate..

trying to get him to look piratish was quite tricky.
Xanthe went in as Alice..

Cameron was not in school today but still wanted to get in on the picture..

Hamish won best boys costume and his prize is a $10 book token and Xanthe won her class prize of a "snee" for those uneducated ones among our audience search Dr Suess to discover what this is.

Having been out yesterday evening we decided to make it two in a row and we had our first supper at East Point for several weeks to watch the sun go down.

Tea was sausage stew and french bread - very nice too.

Whilst waiting for the sun to set the children set up a hermit crab nursery - there were hundreds of the little buggers most of whom are probably quite grumpy now as my three must have moved most of them away from their own patch!

The sunset was worth waiting for..

On the way home we were side tracked by at least five calling Large-tailed Nightjars, one of which we saw quite well but it got flushed just before I could get a picture. For the next 30 minutes we could hear them calling (often from very close by) but we could not see them!
Weekend tomorrow and guess what Tish is on nights!!

There are really only six stories told in the world.....

Today was a day of warmer mornings.You can definitely feel a spring like quality to the air and the mornings are getting notably warmer. As a result of these warmer mornings we are also getting morning "harrs" or as the Aussies say "thickFF" I am sure you can fill in the blanks with the fog! Personally I prefer the gentle Scottish harr description but it was quite thick this morning! However it is very short lived and by 09:30 we had stonking views and a promise of yet another warm day. Dom, Cameron and I decided to explore along the coast a bit and took ourselves off to Gunn Point. We drove a long a tarmac road and then suddenly like all things Territorian one can find yourself in the bush. Down this long dirt track we discovered these guys...

Little Corella's. These parrots are a real scream the have bags of character and in a flock are really noisy. I visited a lady in her home for a postnatal visit the other day and she had one that she had raised from an egg. He was also loud and somebody had taught him to say "Whatcha doin?" So during my examination of the her lovely newborn son I found myself talking to this bird and I answered him!!!!! So one has to ask who the idiot really was the parrot or me for answering?
The track finished and we were rewarded for our journey with this...

Miles and miles of yet another sandy beach. Dom is "PansyShell or SandDoller" hunting. Cameron enjoyed the beach too although his beach attire is somewhat unique.

 The view without the nutters

We were not completely alone on our beach as there was couple camping in our paradise so we didn't stay long. On the way back we saw these guys...

Golden headed Cisticola's these tiny birds are only 9cm big. The photo makes them look massive! I was thrilled by these little birds and they sing loud for little wee chaps.

The evening was more birdy themes but this time it was GooseLake performed by the local seniors from Casuarina Senior College. This play was part of the August Darwin Festival and was held at Festival Park near the esplanade in Darwin, hopefully this picture captures some of the atmosphere.

This story is an Aboriginal Larrakai fable told by local tribeswomen "Aunty Ally" and tells the story of a young boy who falls in love with a girl but he can only see her in the early morning or late evening when she does not take the form of a Magpie Goose. The story is the same the world over whatever culture, hence the blog's title. Swan Lake by another name or the film Ladyhawk by yet another the list can go on....

Aunty Ally welcoming us to her story, traditionally this is in the form of song. They always start the welcome to a story with song.
The students were preparing for their play on stage whilst she was singing which I thought was rather touching.

Images from the story they speak for themselves.

The picture above features the spirit or "dreaming" world elements of the story. The music of swan lake was incorporated into the dance and had a didgeridoo in the back ground... Michael Bourne eat your heart out! After the show they invited the children to be the next generation of geese... here are the Funnell goslings...

and one different goose...

Three Rainbows and no rain....

....how is that possible I hear you cry well read on!
A superb mornings birding today at Holmes Jungle. I was a bit unsure as to what to expect today after the weekends fires at Shoal Bay Rubbish Dump which over looks the reserve but even I was not expecting the extent to which the area had been affected. Probably 70% of the swamp and its adjacent grassland had been flash burnt (which meant there were no quails or buttonquails around my target for the day) and it had extended into the forest itself.

parts of which were still smoldering!
I walked through the swamp first before it got too hot. I knew that there had been a bit of an arrival of Brolga from an e-mail the previous week but I was not expecting there to be over two hundred of them dancing and calling away. I crept through the juncus and managed to get some great views but as I had not taken the digiscoping kit I was only able to get these poor photos of a few birds in flight (although it does show the extent of the burning)

Pictures can never do cranes justice in my opinion as the noise is one of their greatest features. Whilst creeping through the swamp I was surrounded by birds - golden headed cisticola, australian pipit, horsfields bushlark and double barred finches all presumably pushed out of the burnt grasslands into the centre of the swamp.
Any areas of water had a few passage waders such as greenshank and common sandpiper

whilst watching these three a white-browed crake wandered along the far edge before vanishing back into the vegetation.
Having got myself plastered in mud up to the knees decided it was time to go for a short walk round the forest to see what was around although given the extent of the burn was not expecting too much. It was a pleasant surprise then when the first bird I flushed as a Rainbow Pitta. I have seen them here before but I was not expecting to do so today as they are very elusive at this site normally. I carried on through a more open area and saw two Rainbow Lorikeets drinking from a hole in a tree - I had seen several flying over already today but I don't usually get the chance to take any half decent photos but these two were far more obliging..

There was not much else showing although on the way back to the car I watched this group of Red-tailed Black Cockatoo feeding in a recently burnt area

In the car park there were the ubiquitous Rainbow Bee-eaters hunting from the trees making it a three Rainbow day with no rain!
As the tide was dropping and as I had completed the housework yesterday I went to Buffalo Creek to have yet another attempt at seeing Chestnut Rail. This secretive rail lives in the dense mangrove swamps and is most easily seen on a falling tide first thing in the morning - well the tide was falling and it was still morning but only just. I was not expecting to have any luck having sat on the boat ramp many times to no avail, but today was my lucky day and within twenty minutes one was feeding on the other side of the creek. I was so surprised that I dropped my digi camera in the excitement, luckily there was no damage but with the poor light conditions the photos are not good!!

You can just about make out the yellow bill and chestnut body on this one!

Its the weekend

A quiet weekend it has been too. Tish has been working both days on domiciliary (home) visits which has meant that she does not have to get up too early and is back in time for tea. Unfortunately our pool is still out of action as we are waiting the pool company coming to repair the leaks and the pumping system, otherwise I think we would have been in the pool yesterday afternoon.
On Saturday we had a lazy day doing not much at home. My major task was to clean the BBQ which is not a particularly pleasant task, all the cooking surfaces get scrubbed down after each use but the drip tray etc only gets a proper clean once in a while! The children lounged around watching TV and DVDs which was a great chance for them to relax - Xanthe did not even get out of her PJs all day!!
Today we went to Knuckey Lagoon very briefly before a short walk on the beach and then the weekly shop. Our walk on the beach was cut short due to smoke! There were at least four bush fires on the go this morning as well as the tail end of yesterdays fire at Shoal Bay tip. This number of fires is quite normal and no one is bothered it just made visibility very poor!
Knuckey was absolutely over flowing with birds with hundreds of Magpie Geese pouring in..

It was great to see geese coming in and reminded me of Strathbeg although it is considerably warmer and the geese were the wrong species.

Another reminder of autumn back home was this wood sandpiper

these northern hemisphere breeders are passing through the UK at the moment on their way to wintering grounds in southern Africa. This bird is almost certainly from the breeding populations in eastern Russia is one of the early summering visitors coming down the Australia / Pacific flyway to over winter in our summer. Hopefully many more to come with the opportunity to get a better picture or two!

As a quick PS Cameron and I revisited Howard Springs to see if we could get a better picture of the Pitta. The bird showed brilliantly running around only a couple of feet in front of us but as it was dark and the bird was moving fast the pictures are slightly blurred, I did manage to get this shot of it when it stopped a little way into the forest - I had to use the flash though but not a bad shot.