Beautiful Bowerbirds..

Today Tish and I went back to the Southern Tablelands as she wanted to see the Golden Bowerbird so we dropped the children off at the Before School Club at 7am and headed off - before I hear shouts of poor children what about breakfast etc they have a great time with breakfast provided plus heaps to do!!
Anyway by 0845 in the words of the satnav (which we did not use) "you have reached your destination - windows up, sunnies on and dont let the seagulls steal your chips..." well not sure about the sunnies it was more a case of putting on a jumper but you get the drift....
Although it was cool the sun was out and the car park was heaving with birds. The Laurel trees around the car park still had plenty of fruit on them and some were also coming back into flower so there was a huge amount of food, although some of the residents preferred a more unnatural food source....
We wandered off to the bower site. At the start of the month the bower looked like this..

but the male has clearly been working hard and today it had changed...

the lichen and fruits were actually more green than this picture shows but the bower is in such a dark corner of the forest that in order to get any sort of picture we had to use the flash. We stood around for a couple of minutes a reasonable distance from the structure and we were just starting to wonder where the male was when Tish looked up and he had silently flown in and was inspecting us

we had to move back a bit to get the camera to focus.
He was so unconcerned that he started to sing - if you have headphones then listen carefully on the video and you can hear him call four times a very odd series of rapid knocks and buzzes
http://youtu.be/AjA6HGp5iV4

Having had such brilliant views we headed back to the car park to check out all action there and have our breakfast - fruit cake (made by Jen our neighbour) and fruit. We were sitting quietly at one of the picnic tables when we were joined by this Lewin's Honeyeater

When it first appeared the video camera was not ready and so we missed his song as we unfortunately disturbed him when we got it out of the bag. it didn't take long though for him to return and take his reward...

http://youtu.be/m99mm4TePDA

 

Most of the other birds were less photographically obliging...

 

This male Golden Whistler refused to turn round although he was a bit more helpful than this

White-throated Treecreeper

who played hide and seek around the tree trunks with me!

Back home the big news though is that our Olive Backed Sunbird has taken up residency in her nest...

Think we are going off out this evening with Alan looking for Crocs etc.....