Hi all
One of the commercial tv news reports - think it was Ten - late last
night had a story re a Black-necked Stork being found and cared for by
WIRES in Sydney. The bird was repeatedly referred to as a 'Jabiru
Stork', the location not given. The bird was shown and was clearly an
immature bird - brown-necked. One explanation given was that a holiday
maker might have brought the bird back to Sydney, possibly having taken
a juvenile from the wild, then released it after it became too big. I
would imagine the only captive Sydney birds would be at Taronga and
Featherdale. I'm not aware of recent records of this species around
Sydney - guess there would be very few records in recent years, perhaps
from the Hawkesbury?
The story reminded me of two very unusual records of my own from the
1970s, when I was a young birder living in East Lindfield in the
northern suburbs of Sydney. I had my first ever views of a Black-necked
Stork here, flying over our garden - this was around 1975/76 but was
before the time that I kept records. I was amazed at the sight of a
Jabiru (as they were more commonly called in those days) quite low over
our home.
Also some time in the mid 1970s, another unusual sighting here was a
Black Bittern - flushed from a stand of some kind of exotic lily growing
in our front garden. I shouted out to my mother " A bittern a bittern a
bittern", which caused her to fly into a panic ready to get the ambos in
to treat me for a funnel-web spider bite (they definitely outnumbered
the bitterns). I sent my story in to the naturalist Vincent Serventy,
who in those days wrote a weekly column in the Sun Herald, and he
published the story with a pic of what I recall was a Little Bittern.
The location may have been on some kind of flyway as I had many
sightings of waterbirds - herons, ibis (which were not so common in
Sydney in those days), cormorants and ducks - passing overhead in the 12
years we lived here. It is close to Middle Harbour, where there is
potential Black Bittern habitat.
Eric Finley
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