Hi everyone,
I went down to Western Treatment Plant yesterday to see the male
Northern Shoveller and found it without too much effort. I was really
impressed with the numbers and diversity of ducks on Lake Borrie.
Within a few hundred metres there were 10 species of duck
Blue-billed Duck
Musk Duck
Australian Shelduck
Pacific Black Duck
Australian Shoveler (1000s)
Northern Shoveller (1)
Grey Teal
Chestnut Teal
Pink-eared Duck (10s of 1000s?)
Hardhead
I missed the Freckled Ducks yesterday which have been around and I also
missed Wood Duck so you could potentially get 12 ducks very close
together. So has anyone seen 12 ducks in a day in Victoria or anywhere
else in Australia? What is the best Duck twitch for a day?
Also of interest at Werribee was a Peregrine hunting over lake Borrie
and 3 Whistling Kites getting very agitated fighting over what I think
was a coot. The Kites were fighting for it in the air as well as
harassing the winner on the ground.
I stopped in at Pt. Cook on the way back to Melbourne and saw quite a
number of Brown Quail, one Spotted crake and an adult and immature
Pallid Cuckoo. The immature cuckoo was begging for food from the adult
cuckoo by making a really weird noise a bit like a single grating frog
croak which was quite loud. Surprising to me also that an adult cuckoo
was feeding a young one.
There is certainly a bit of breeding going on with the young cuckoo, a
very young (maybe only first day out of nest) white-browed scrubwren and
some fluffball masked Lapwings around.
Best Wishes
John Boyce
--
*********************************************************************
John Boyce
Department of Microbiology
Monash University
3800
Australia
ph (w) +61 3 9905 4838 (h) +61 3 9376 6641
mobile ph 0409 766642
fax (w) +61 3 9905 4811
*********************************************************************
Birding-Aus is on the Web at
www.shc.melb.catholic.edu.au/home/birding/index.html
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send the message
"unsubscribe birding-aus" (no quotes, no Subject line)
to
|
