Slightly red

 

The Red Wattlebird isn't as red as you might think. Here's one in the front yard today, making merry with the grevillea flowers.

Its only red bits  are its 'wattles', the dangly bits below its cheeks. They tend to be invisible unless you can get up pretty close.

Having a butchers

Back to a COVID lockdown in Sydney this week. So back to daily walks in the local parks, takeaway coffee in the car, and today a nice big slice of banana bread that was on special with the coffee.

Butcherbirds are supposed to be carnivorous, but this one got very interested in my banana bread. Or maybe he was hoping to take my eye out. I kept the window shut.

He's a grey butcher bird (Cracticus torquatus).

Last laugh for Aldi's toy telescope!

 

Checking out last week's Aldi specials, I came across their $40 'spotting scope'. Surely just a toy, I thought, at that price. But I needed a new toy, so I gave it a go and bought one. 

And you get to see owls and kookaburras, going by the pictures on the box!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No owls or koalas so far, but when I tried it out at Crosslands Reserve, a convenient kookaburra was lurking. And the pictures I got, just holding my phone camera up to the eyepiece aren't that bad at all!

Dollarbird!

I saw him chasing insects from his perch on the power lines outside yesterday. He was very handsome, and he was completely new to me. He's a dollarbird (Eurystomus orientalis).

Somehow I'd never heard of him, let alone spotted one of his kind. 

The books and the birdo sites don't actually seem to indicate that dollarbirds are particularly rare in Sydney. Like the channel-billed cuckoo and the koel, they are summer visitors from New Guinea and Indonesia.

Backyard birds

 

It's just been Backyard Bird Count Week. I did my usual 20 minutes count, and spotted all the usual rainbow lorikeets, noisy miners, sulphur crested cockatoos, etc, and a family of king parrots happened by at just the right time too.

 

 

 

 

 

Here's a rather over-friendly king parrot who came to visit us a few weeks ago.

 

 

And a very big family of rainbow lorikeets.

 

 

 

 

 A tawny frogmouth

And a brown cuckoo-dove I spotted nearby last week. I'd seen these before, without quite getting round to identifying them properly.

Getting the blues to get the girls

I came across this yesterday while bushwalking in the North Rocks area. It's a satin bower bird's bower.

The male bird builds this thing, which is not a nest, but a place to do ritual dances around, and then collects blue things. He's extremely fond of blue things.

And presumably, so are the females. The more blue things he's collected and showing off, the better his chances of getting the girl.

Presumably bright blue things used to be rare and precious. Now there's lots of them and they're nearly all plastic bottle tops, straws, or suchlike. The magic must still work though.

More on them here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satin_bowerbird

We were wondering why blue is the chosen colour. Maybe it's the relative rarity of the colour in nature. A bit like we're often attracted to gold? There again, the male bird himself has a blue sheen, and bright blue eyes. We didn't see him yesterday, but here's a picture from the Wikipedia article.

                                          Photo: Joseph C Boone

Covid countdown - birds of Cherrybrook

Even with the tightened 'sort-of-lockdown' conditions to be imposed at midnight tonight, we're allowed out for exercise purposes. And when you live near the bush, there's scope for an awful lot of that.

In and around Cherrybrook yesterday I saw this white-throated treecreeper












And here's a white-faced heron

Dubbo's birds

All spotted at Dubbo Zoo, though only one of them was an official exhibit.

Here's an emu.



















And an apostlebird. Wikipedia tells me it's also known as a grey jumper, a lousy jack, or a cwa bird.

And the Australian white ibis. This one's widely known as the 'bin chicken', because of its passion for hanging out in and around rubbish bins, in Sydney parks and elsewhere. Some love it, but most of us do not.

More garden parrots

This one's the yellow-tailed black cockatoo. He's one of two who visited the front garden this afternoon, and crunched away on the seeds of a Banksia tree. You usually see them further west, in the mountains. I don't recall seeing them here in the northern suburbs that much before.

Here's an Australian Geographic article on the subject: Australian Geographic article

Love birds

Our Spotted Doves. They're there in the front garden most days. Very in love.

Not a complete Wash-out!

I've always been curious about The Wash, that distinctly shaped chunk out of England's East Coast backside. So on my way back from Yorkshire, I couldn't resist the temptation to go and take a look.

Well of course there isn't all that much to see. It's all incredibly flat, and a lot of it is marsh for a lot of the time anyway.

I did see the offshore wind farms though. They were quite  interesting.

And at Gibraltar Point nature reserve, there were nature trails, and bird hides, where you could observe the water birds from up close. I had to settle for a couple of swans, which did seem more relaxed than usual. The visitor centre has a list of the day's sightings. The tally was 15 species.

Away with the birdos

I had an excellent morning excursion yesterday with the Cumberland Bird Observers' Club. We went to Crosslands Reserve, and during a three hour stroll I counted a very respectable 21 bird species.

I'm not entirely new to bird observing, but I am to the club, and appreciated leader Trevor's introductory talk, on field guides, binocular use, observer etiquette, and lots more.


Trevor has travelled the world pursuing his passion, and he knows his stuff.


We'd hardly started when somebody spotted a white-bellied sea eagle perched in a tree. Out came the binoculars and the 1000mm long lenses. (And out came my $150 Aldi camera too! It did a respectable job as ever.)

Two tawny frogmouths now. No way I'd have noticed them without the trained eyes of the old hands in the group. They look like bits of tree.

Ditto a Lewin's Honeyeater. The regulars had been hearing him and his friends for a while and recognising his call.




My day's 21-species list:
Australian Wood Duck, Noisy Miner, White-bellied Sea Eagle, White-faced Heron, Eastern Spinebill, Crimson Rosella, Australian Raven, Dusky Moorhen, Magpie-Lark, Lewin's Honeyeater, Golden Whistler, Australian Magpie, Grey Butcherbird, Masked Lapwing, Chestnut Teal, Tawny Frogmouth, Superb Lyrebird, Striated Thornbill, Brown Gerygone, Australian Brush-turkey, and Superb Fairy Wren.

Count me!

It's been Aussie Backyard Bird Count Week again, and yours truly has been doing his bit. In my case it involves sitting on my roof (I love my roof), for 20 minutes at a time, noting down all the birds that turn up in my field of view.

It goes like this. Noisy Miner, Noisy Miner, ...........Kookaburra, Noisy Miner, Sulphur Crested Cockatoo, ..........a wattle bird or two, .........and what were those little things flitting overhead so quick?  And then another Noisy Miner.

The results go online immediately, and 2017 statistics can be viewed here:  https://aussiebirdcount.org.au/statistics/

The full 2016 results are here: https://aussiebirdcount.org.au/2016-results/
Australia-wide, the rankings were: 1. Rainbow Lorikeet, 2. Noisy Miner, 3. Australian Magpie. Within New South Wales, it was: 1. Rainbow Lorikeet, 2. Noisy Miner, 3. Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo.

I was rigorous with my timings, and of course found that the most interesting birds appeared just after the 20 minutes was up. Look at this beautiful and amazingly cheeky King Parrot, who turned up yesterday to check out our back patio (and me), during a non-counting period.