On the theme of people releasing wild-caught birds far from their
original habitat, there is a story that ACT Parks people were bemused
to find a Little Penguin splashing around in the fountain pool at the
bottom of Anzac Parade in Canberra.
The explanation was that someone had found a moulting Little Penguin
on a beach down the coast and decided to take it home as a pet. Two
hours in a car with the belligerent little so and so convinced them
this wasn't a good idea and the 'pet' was jettisoned in the first pool
they came to in Canberra.
John Leonard
2009/1/13 Eric Finley <>:
> 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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--
John Leonard
Canberra
Australia
www.jleonard.net
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