canberrabirds

Birds of the Hay Plains

To: "'martin butterfield'" <>, "'COG List'" <>
Subject: Birds of the Hay Plains
From: "Lindsay Hansch" <>
Date: Sat, 28 Jul 2012 13:52:04 +1000

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.

 

Martin

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