Painted Snipe; Button-quail

["Andrew Stafford" <>]

Hi all

 

Two juvenile Painted Snipe (one male and one female) were seen at Bill Gunn Dam aka Lake Dyer today at 3.20 pm. They were squatting/standing on the muddy shoreline about 80 metres to the right of the boatramp. They were seemingly content to rely on camouflage - or else were quite tame - and I was able to approach them to within 15 metres and watch them unobtrusively for over 20 minutes. Eventually I left them as I found them without the birds flushing. No Plum-headed Finches were sighted, but one male Stubble Quail amongst a group of Brown Quail was an interesting sighting. Many thanks to Bill Jolly for passing on this information. The dam is just outside of Laidley in the Lockyer Valley, south of the Warrego Hwy, and is well signposted.

 

Returning home via the link road from Wivenhoe Dam to Mt Glorious in the early evening, I saw three Carpet Python and was very lucky not to squash the first; a very beautiful frog Litoria sp. (pr. leuseuri?); a rather tatty-looking Dingo and two Tawny Frogmouths.

 

Yesterday in the late afternoon at Gold's Scrub Lane, Samsonvale Cemetery, I flushed one and heard a number of Red-backed Button-quail in addition to one male King Quail. Earlier in the afternoon at Boombana National Park near Mt Nebo I lucked into a pair of Barred Cuckoo-shrikes and found a family group of Noisy Pittas on the aptly named Pitta Circuit Trail. The young Pittas were using a contact call I'd never heard before: a quite haunting indrawn whistle, soft but penetrating.

 

A great couple of afternoon's birding - one need not always be up at the crack of dawn, even in the deep north!

 

Cheers

 

AS