Throughout the 1990s I saw them ‘here-and-there’ at Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve and, during the same period, about ten times at Australian National Botanic Gardens. One time an employee of the gardens told me he sometimes saw them early on winter mornings fossicking among leaf litter in car park gutters out front of the Visitors’ Centre. Also at ANBG I saw what was either courting behaviour or the feeding of a dependent young, dunno which.
John K. Layton
Yes Peter, I have recorded them. That is I have heard them and tape recorded them at our lyrebird study site along the Camel Back trail.
Bassian Thrush used to be common at Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve in the wet sclerophyl forest around the walking tracks there but disappeared during the Jan '03 fire. We did postfire small mammal trapping and spotlight surveys at several sites in the reserve shortly after the fire at sites that had been surveyed before the fire and found that all the mammal species that were there before the fire were there after the fire. But the only birds that were present in the charred wet sclerophyl forest were a few Flame Robin down low, one or two Sulphur Crested Cockatoo up high in the bare canopy and a pair of White-browed Scrubwren darting between the scattered charred remains of bushes along the creek line. A few weeks later I found the carcass of a Lyrebird that had made it through the fire but had starved after the fire due to the litter having been burnt down to mineral soil. This phenomenon had been reported after other severe fires before.
Has anyone seen/heard any Bassian Thrush at TNR since the fire? Have any bird surveys been done after the fire to see haw the different species come back apart from the Lyrebird survey?
