Hi Birders,
On Saturday 25 June 2005 an adult male Northern Shoveler, which was
accompanied by a female Shoveler, was seen at Seale's Rd Swamp, located on
the Kempsey-Gladstone Rd via Seale's Rd & Belmore River. The bird was
located as soon as my son Tim and I alighted from the vehicle, appearing as
a brown and white object, at about 9O m distance at the edge of a wetland
with about 60 other Australasian Shovelers. Using a telescope we had perfect
views of the Northern Shoveler in sunlight on the south side of the road.
We watched the bird for over 40 minutes, after 25 minutes a Swamp Harrier
flushed this group of Shovelers and Grey Teal and they flew across the road
and joined a larger flock of waterbirds, roughly 1000 Shovelers and 800 Grey
Teal on the otjher side. The bird was then watched at distances of 100-160 m
but eventually after the Swamp Harriers had moved elsewhere, the pair
returned to the south side of the road. We could not distinguish anything
different about the female shoveler with the other female Australasian
Shovelers that were close by although our best views of the female where
when she was on the north side of the road and we were facing into the sun.
I notified local birdwatchers and later that afternoon Ken Shingleton and
Alan Gill were able to locate the pair of birds at the same location without
much difficulty. If accepted this will be the 5th confirmed record for NSW,
the last two records being at South West Rocks and Ash Island in 2002,
although during that year there were three additional reports of the bird
for which no submissions to BARC were made.
Is the Werribee bird still down at the STW?
Alan Morris
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