My team, Just a Little Cuckoo, clocked up 167 species in our 24 hours. We had
I think three species in the 15 minutes before the start that disappeared and
didn't pop up again during the 24 hours.
It was the first time that Bill de Belin, John de Heaume and I formed a team
for the Twitchathon. We Sydney-siders took a route that started out west,
included some rainforest, east coast birds and water and seabirds. Our best
birds were Cockatiel, Budgerigar and Grey-crowned Babbler at the Caltex
service station at Stroud!!
I believe the winners got 181 birds and interestingly, we had some birds that
they didn't, so the gap of 14 birds to our 167 is interesting. All the luck
of the draw on the day, and creates some interesting thought as to how to
better our itinerary to get 15 or more extra birds. I don't think we had any
really serious misses, though the Diamond Firetails weren't where they were
supposed to be. Pink-eared Ducks, Comb-crested Jacana and Nankeen
Night-Herons however were where they had been seen a week before.
It started raining for us about 12.30pm and got me quite worried that we were
going to miss out on a huge number of species in two particular habitats, but
fortunately the rain stopped about 2.15pm and we were able to get back to
"clocking them up".
Congratulations to the winners, and to everyone who participated to raise
money for saving the woodlands.
Cheers
Irene Denton
Sydney NSW Australia
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