Busy week, Bowers, Rifles and Night Parrots Pictures.....

We have had a very varied and busy schedule this week giving Jaap our Dutch client an introduction into the birds of North Queensland. Inevitably there were some things that just would not behave but on the whole we had a superb views of most of our target species.
One of the notable features was the sheer number of Bowerbirds that we both heard and saw; we had great views of all five species that you can find in this part of Queensland; in most cases multiple sightings - five Great Bowerbirds around a bower, 14+ Satin Bowerbirds feeding in a couple of trees, Tooth-billed Bowerbirds in virtually every suitable pocket of habitat and the seemingly ever reliable male Golden Bowerbird

singing Tooth-billed Bowerbird by Andy MacDougall.

male Golden Bowerbird.
We were also incredibly lucky with displaying Victoria's Riflebird.  We found three adult males in full display and several immatures trying to strut their stuff - the adult males though were having none of it and would drive off the young upstarts

We visited both the Northern and Southern Tablelands taking in a great range of habitat types from the Tropical Rainforests through to open Savanah Woodland.
Here are a selection of the highlights:

This is a very poor shot of an Atherton Scrubwren - this wet Tropics endemic can be exceedingly difficult to get prolonged views of as it tends to bounce around all over the place, rarely stopping. We were exceptionally lucky when we found a group of three or four birds that were more interested in feeding an gathering nest materials giving us great views, unfortunately they were in a dark bit of the forest and my camera struggled to compensate!

This Pied Monarch was on its nest and reasonably tolerant of us but again it was in a dark little corner...

The Australian Bustards were much harder to see than sometimes possibly due to the extreme temperatures - the thermometre in the van peaked at 46.5 at one point!

Even that iconic Australian Outback bird the Emu seemed to be struggling in the heat - well this males two chicks were certainly panting as they walked past.

There are still plenty of waterfowl around - including Cotton Pygmy Geese, Freckled Duck and Pink-eared Duck.

Wetland birds were turning up anywhere that they could find open water

this very obliging Latham's Snipe was feeding in the irrigation channel beside a sugar cane crop

It wasn't just the forest specialities that were in nesting mode

this Tawny Frogmouth was completely at ease on its rather pathetic excuse for a nest!

The most unexpected encounter though was with John Young the naturalist who has recently rediscovered the Night Parrot. the Night Parrot is probably the rarest of all Australian birds with very few accepted and documented records of live birds. We were attempting to find Crested Shrike-tit for Jaap when two birders walked out of the bush - John Young and a friend. John was very generous with both his time and knowledge and showed us where a pair of Shrike-tit were nest building..

whilst waiting for birds to re-appear the conversation naturally turned to his discovery and much to our delight he offered to show us some of his footage, an offer we were very happy to accept.

here is his collection of Night Parrot feathers.
He has taken over 600 images of this secretive and seemingly sedentary bird and he showed us several as well as his astonishing high quality video footage of the parrot hopping through the spinifex scrub. There has been talk on the web about the veracity of John's sightings but having seen just a small proportion of the footage John has there can be absolutely no doubt - once he has sorted all the issues relating to this astonishing find John has said that more details will be published, something to truly look forward to.
Many thanks to John for sparing the time to show us some of his work.

Short Notice Tours

On Monday 8th we had an enquiry to see if we were available for a tour the next day - luckily we were as we never like to let clients down - and so 0515 on Tuesday morning found us picking up Stephen and Barbara from their hotel at the Marina.
They are visiting Australia from Canada and had a few days based in Cairns before flying back down south to Melbourne.From our e-mail conversation whilst we were sorting out the booking it was clear that their main targets were anything that they had not seen around Brisbane. This meant only one thing - a tour around the key sites on the Southern Tablelands targeting not the Wet Tropic endemics and any other goodies we could find.
The day was a great success with eleven of the twelve endemics seen really well - the twelfth Macleay's Honeyeater we heard but it never showed itself. In total we recorded over 100 species many of which were ticks for our guests, it is great to take birders out and help them find new species!
Here are a few of the days highlights....

Any day that you see Southern Cassowary is going to be a good day!

The male Golden Bowerbird is always a favourite - we also saw several Tooth-billed and Satin Bowerbirds

Pied Monarch are very good at hiding so it was great to be able to watch one feeding as it crawled up a tree.

This male Rufous Whistler very obligingly sat and sang at eye level, unfortunately he was always in deep shade.

There were still many Pink-eared Ducks in the area, many of them were feeding in these curious circles. This presumably increases feeding efficiency.

All in all a very productive and enjoyable days birding.

I briefly met up with Stephen and Barbara on Cairns esplanade on Wednesday, apart from a nice selection of waders we also found a very obliging Mangrove Robin