My early morning excursion today was to the Sea-front at the nearby coastal town of Wynnum. The tide was low and vast areas of mud-flats lay all along the shoreline, to the north a large mangrove swamp stretched for miles. The local council provided nice pathways and a very impressive boardwalk through the mangrove swamp, so after scoping the beach area, where I logged over 20 species, I headed for the mangroves.
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| OLIVE-BACKED ORIOLE |
Lots of birds were singing and very few were showing, however I did manage to see Olive-backed Oriole, Australasian Figbird, Kookaburra and a couple of new species!
First a small flock of tiny birds came noisily through the trees, it took a while but I finally got great views of a couple of them, they were MANGROVE GERYGONE (remember to pronounce this name as.......GER (as in gerbil).....RIDGE....ON....KNEE ). then after a few minutes I saw what I thought was a LEADEN FLYCATCHER, but on closer inspection this male was altogether darker and had dark under-tail feathers, so I had a SATIN FLYCATCHER in my bins. The bird wouldn't keep still enough for a photo. A third new species appeared above me as the boardwalk entered a drier area of woodland, it was a Pale-headed Rosella, technically a race or subspecies of Eastern Rosella but it looks totally different.
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| The colourful PALE-HEADED ROSELLA |
The boardwalk continued to supply good birds and finished about 1km further north. The path then widened and wound its way up to a small hillock of open grass which overlooked a huge pool (which was currently dry on low tide) a lovely hide was positioned in front of the pool. This would obviously be a great place to come on high tide when all the waders are roosting, I must come back at high tide.
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| TORRESIAN CROW |
The grassy area provided good viewing for Fairy Wrens and another first for me the Golden-headed Cisticola. A couple of raptors flew over as I was leaving, Brahminy Kite and later a White-bellied Sea-Eagle.
After breakfast Dawn and set off southward to look at the GOLD COAST before we move down there later in the week. We were totally shocked to see a modern version of Torremolinos, high rise apts. thousands of them, one beach is called Miami and it looked just like it, ugh! after driving through 20-30 kilometers of concrete, glass and plastic we eventually found a nice beach, called Paradise Beach. We settled on there and spent a few hours relaxing before taking a walk.
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| Yellow-tailed Black-Cockatoo |
Just before our walk I got another lifer when a group of noisy Cockatoos flew into the trees immediately behind us. They turned out to be Yellow-tailed Black-Cockatoos. During the walk we had great views of Little Wattlebird, Buff-banded Rail, Brown Honeyeater and lots of Rainbow Lorikeets.
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| LITTLE WATTLEBIRD |
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259. MANGROVE GERYGONE
260. SATIN FLYCATCHER
261. PALE-HEADED ROSELLA
262. GOLDEN CROWNED CISTICOLA
263. YELLOW-TAILED BLACK-COCKATOO
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