Weekend catch up

Sorry there have been no blogs for a few days, and this is likely to be the only blog this week as Tish has not been well and I have been rather busy.
On Thursday I had a busy day doing another recce on the southern Tablelands whilst Tish was due to catch up with sleep before her first night shift. Unfortunately the best laid plans don't always work and in true Funnell style this was the case. I did indeed go out but Tish got no sleep as Hamish has a dose of Tonsillitis and stayed at home - not ideal prep for a night shift which as it turned out never happened as Tish was taken ill herself....
Here are a few pictures from my outing on Thursday - despite not targeting the wet tropic endemics we ended up finding 11 out of the 12 (we could have found the last one but we wanted to check a couple of new sites rather than spend time looking for a bird we had both seen before).
There were so many highlights but here are a few.
After the scorn poured on my pictures of Golden Bowerbird a couple of weeks ago we returned in better weather and took some slight improvements:
Here is the males Bower

he uses this to attract and impress the girls...
Whilst he was not in full go for it mode because it was exceedingly cold (9 degrees) and it is just too early in the season. He did though come and bring in some fresh lichen to decorate it and came and sat above us and gave quite a show; unfortunately due to the angle you don't get his full glory but still an improvement on my previous attempts

Among the other numerous highlights was one of my most wanted species the Crested Shrike-tit. This stunning little bird is uncommon in North Queensland, only occurring in a couple of areas (although more widely distributed further south in Australia).
These pictures do not do it any justice at all, but it was too far away and the light conditions were not helpful

I also experimented with taking some sound recordings of the Eastern Whipbird whose calls are the real sound track to the rainforests up here but I cannot work out how to upload a sound file onto the blog sorry....

In the immortal words of Bugs Bunny "Thats All Folks" - not sure when I will be able to post again.