To resume this little travelogue, I returned to Canberra via the Echuca route. This took me to Daylesford, and by the hamlet of Newstead, and a few kilometres to the south of there is a relic of the gold-mining days in the form of an anciently dredged eucalypt-lined creeklet marked by the sign ‘Jim Crow Creek’. At this point the quiet road and a rail line are near one another. I was standing under a gum tree watching a pair of noisy Striated Pardalotes going in and out of a crevice in the railway bridge when I became aware of another bird a few metres above my head. This was a female Crested Shrike-tit that had clearly GOT HOLD OF something on which it was working enthusiastically. This appears, on examination of the photographs, to be a cicada that must have been grabbed by Ms Secateurs just as it was about to emerge from the nymph casing. No stridulations from that one, then.
