We drove to the Sunshine Coast
and back last month and there were literally hundreds of Black-shouldered Kites
and Nankeen Kestrels along the whole route. Must be a good year for them –
or their food source.
Lindsay Hansch
From: martin
butterfield [
Sent: Saturday, 28 July 2012 9:32
AM
To: COG List
Subject: [canberrabirds] Birds of
the Hay Plains
I know this is a bit out of the COG AOI but members of the list may
travel this way from time to time so I thought this may be of interest.
We have just returned from a trip to Eyre Peninsula
(excellent area, blog to come) and on the way across noted the very large
numbers of Black-shouldered Kites and Nankeen Kestrels around. On the way
back we recorded the numbers of raptors (and emus) seen. It is 125km from
the junction east of Balranald to Hay so we stopped the game when we got 125km
East of Hay. Unless the birds can fly significantly faster than 110kph they
were all different specimens!
|
Species
|
West of Hay
|
East of Hay
|
|
Black-shouldered Kite
|
29
|
18
|
|
Nankeen Kestrel
|
5
|
11
|
|
Black Kite
|
4
|
3
|
|
Swamp Harrier
|
1
|
0
|
|
Brown Falcon
|
2
|
0
|
|
White-bellied Sea Eagle
|
0
|
1
|
|
|
|
|
|
EMU
|
19
|
0
|
Another interesting (to me at least) observation was that the obvious
crop on the Plain was cotton. We have never seen this before and the
bales in the paddocks were very obvious (as were the stray bits of cotton on
the roadside) I'd be surprised if we had simply overlooked it when travelling
at this time of year.
