LONG REEF is the best place on Sydney’s Northern Beaches for a migratory shorebird encounter. It’s a brilliantly fascinating and vibrant intertidal, ecological hotspot: a real nature lover magnet! So it’s not unusual to find me stalking about the reef with scope and bins and magnifying glass, as I was yesterday, during a brief break [...]
YOU’D HAVE TO BE out of town to not be aware that there has now been two events at the Manly Little Penguin rookery this week where dogs have attacked and killed penguins. The death toll is now seven.
This is seven Little Penguins too many. These events highlight a convergence of problems that we have [...]
RIGHT NOW most of the world’s population of Red-necked Stints are in the middle of raising their young high in the arctic circle (at least I hope that they are, given that they’ve experienced total breeding crashes the last 2 out of 3 years). The adults will return with their young sometime in September. Meanwhile [...]
Since returning from Broome I’ve had the opportunity to bird a number of locations on the Northern Beaches, including Deep Creek, Warriewood Wetlands, Billarong Reserve and some of the Narrabeen Lakes Catchment. On the south side, I’ve been restricted to the scrub around Quibray Bay and on the road to Boat Harbour. On each occasion [...]
I’ve birded some sites which are pretty iconic in terms of bush birding in Australia. These include: Chiltern Forest (Vic), Larapinta Trail (NT), Nourlangie Rock (NT), Lawn Hill (Qld), Bladensburg NP (Qld), the Piliga (NSW), Washpool NP (NSW), Dorrigo NP (NSW), Mornington Sanctuary (WA), Capertee Valley (NSW), Gross Valley (NSW), practically the entire Simpson Desert, [...]
It’s been a pretty big couple of weeks for me. My trip to Roebuck Bay delivered a bunch of rarities and rare vagrants, including a second Australian record. You always expect a rarity or two when you visit the Broome region – its situation in the broader geography and the structure of the vegetation and [...]
I’ve just returned to Sydney from my mozzie dome in the campground of Broome Bird Observatory, on the shores of Roebuck Bay, North Western Australia. During my time in Broome I witnessed tens of thousands of shorebirds preparing for their annual migratory journeys to Asia and, for many, well within the Arctic Circle on Northern [...]
If you know me and you’re into the “big” sightings, the unusual and rarities, you’ll work out pretty quickly not to bother asking me if there is good birding at any location. This is because my idea of a great day’s birding is to get a really good view of whatever is the common thornbill [...]
IS THERE ANY DOUBT in any nature lover’s mind that the Spotted Pardalote is among the most engaging, beautiful and sweet of Australia’s bird life? For many birders, that’s all they need to know: that they can go out into the bush just about anywhere on Tasmania or the east coast, south coast and lower [...]
MOST GROUPS or genera within the Sandpiper family have the remarkable ability to “see” what is beneath the mud or sand where they seek out the invertebrate prey (macrobenthic organisms) which lives there. Of course they don’t use their eyes for this task, they have a highly sensitive bill tip which helps them feel their [...]
IT WAS AN EXCITING TIME for me at Boat Harbour yesterday. The morning (low tide) survey was amazing, with tens of thousands of shearwaters moving in massive flocks on the horizon, large flocks of Kelp Gulls (well for me anyway – dozen at a time) and plenty of shorebird activity. It appears that our Little [...]
WE’VE ALL WATCHED those nature doco’s where the large predator (generally a large cat, wolf or shark) takes its prey and immediately understand that an animal which didn’t measure up was taken. Perhaps it was not fit enough in some way. Perhaps it was young and dumb. Perhaps it was old and feeble. Whatever traits the prey [...]
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