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
You're cerainly seeing some birds. Our nuthatch is a frequent visitor and we've seen the long tailed tit several times - both immature and bright pink adult.
ReplyDelete