Back on the list

["martin butterfield" <>]

Thanks to the usual excellent service from David I am back on the list and will put up a few comments about observations this week.

 

On Tuesday Frances and I went for a walk around East Basin, starting at the Kelly's Mud Flat car park.  The first highlights were at the Tadorna hide.  Here we saw 2 Latham's snipe on the far bank and a single Black-winged stilt in the water.  Moving out to the bitumen where a European greenfinch had ignored the "keep out" signs around the newest development site.  Other than mavelling at quality of the finish on the apartments on Kingston foreshores little exciting occurred until we got to the area on the Lake where model yachts sail: here we were perplexed by an albinistic Eurasian coot.

 

Molonglo Reach did the right thing by us in presenting a large number of darters of all ages and levels of activity.  Many nests were still occupied by adult birds, presumably sitting on eggs or young. 

 

Getting back to the Sewage Ponds we quickly recorded a very nice range of ducks, including one Freckled duck on pond 6.  The only duck "usually occurring in the ACT" we missed out was a Mountain Duck.  Overall we totalled 53 species.

 

On Wednesday we headed for Mullies looking for lorikeets and black honeyeaters.  We were succusesful in a small (or at least little) way wiith the former but not the latter.  As foreshadowed by a member of this group some weeks ago I was astonished by the present access arrangements for Mulligans Flat: if one was looking for a conspiracy theory to pursue, the positioning of the site office for the new suburb coould offer some interesting possibilities.

 

Overall it was a pretty stunning return to Canberra's birds with a total of 75 species between noon Monday and dark on Thursday.

 

Martin