Hello Martin
What I suspect was the same flock soared overhead around here for a period of 10 minutes around 9.30 am this morning. For part of the time they were slowly circling in a nearby thermal. I was out in the paddocks with binoculars at the time and had a good view of the flock and of a few birds that dropped out of the sky to a height of 100 metres or so. My count stopped when I got to 100 and there were still many not included. The birds were almost certainly not Dusky WS and as best I could judge by their appearance and calls they were probably White-browed WS. If so, I guess it is possible that there were a few Masked WS in the group.
Cheers
John
From: martin butterfield [
Sent: Tuesday, 8 November 2011 1:51 PM
To: Nicki Taws
Cc:
Subject: Re: [canberrabirds] Woodswallows X 3
A large (~100 birds), high and noisy flock of Woodswallows visited Carwoola about 10:15 this morning. As I was weeding I didn't have my binoculars with me so couldn't guess at the species. By the rather brief time I had dashed in to gather some optical assistance the birds had gone. I suspect heading SW towards Captains Flat. They were also unkind enough to have not even grazed the edge of my GBS site.
Martin
On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 4:54 PM, Nicki Taws <> wrote:
Flocks of Woodswallows flew over Cook 3 times today. The first flock at 8.15 was the largest, maybe 100 or so. Then at 12pm and 4pm smaller flocks of c. 20, although they were higher and more dispersed so I may not have seen all the birds. All flocks were heading north-west into the breeze. They had me wondering whether they were the same birds on some grand 4 hour circuit, heading north-west until they were sucked up in a thunderstorm vortex and blown back south-east to do it all again. :-)
