Cathedral Choirs Chorus..

With Tish having been stuck in doors for much of the last couple of weeks we decided that today was the perfect day for a little jaunt up onto the Tablelands.
Our first stop was at Hasties Swamp as there was a nice selection of waterfowl there including Australian Shoveler which I had not seen before. The swamp was still full both with water and ducks, unfortunately there was no sign of the shovelers.
The birding though was pretty good, so much so that even Tish sat down with the bins....

 I managed to get a couple of better pictures of the Freckled Ducks that are hanging around

These are Australia's most threatened duck, normally restricted to SE and the extreme SW of Australia they are prone to dispersal during periods of drought but they are exceptionally rare this far north.
The most unexpected sight though was a much smaller and duller bird the Spotless Crake

Having never seen one before I was suitably impressed, as was Tish who kept saying "but its so small..."
The prize for the cutest bird of the day though with out doubt goes to this family of Purple Swamphens

They were close enough to get some video footage as well
http://youtu.be/GXJf9bd5PDs

From Hasties we moved on to a couple of other sites that Tish has not visited before. Our next stop was Lake Barrine where we sat down to a nice cream tea over looking the lake and watched the world go by.

The gardens around the car park are always good value not only for birds but also butterflies and some spectacular flowers.
Today was no exception although we have not worked out what this flower is

The light was very good and despite there being many people wandering around I managed to get my best picture of Eastern Spinebill yet

They are I think my favourite honeyeater.
We then headed home via the Cathedral Fig Tree where we did the normal tourist things of gawping at a massively impressive 500 year old fig

The most spectacular aspect though other than the tree itself was the chorus of forest birds that were belting out their respective stuff all the time. We tried to take some audio of them and attach it to some video of the forest - the birds that you can hear are Chowchilla one of the twelve Wet Tropic endemics.
http://youtu.be/Aj0DzVZ7S1o