Hello subscribers, great excitement at our place in Chapman yesterday
morning when Andrea thought she saw a female, or more likely, a fledgling Koel
in our garden.
It was around again this morning and I’ve been able to get good looks a
number of times over the past 3 hours or so. It’s certainly is a fledgling
even though it supports a very nice striped tail, as it doesn’t fly very
securely and most importantly is giving this constant, one noted repeated
begging type call. The pictures in HANZAB also support this, in particular
the lighter head colouring.
While red wattlebirds were originally around there was no evidence of any
feeding, in fact when close the wattlebird gave a growling type alarm call (why
I first thought it might have been a female). However, with a bit more
patience I have now seen a single red wattlebird feed it twice at around a 5
minute interval.
Interestingly I also saw a new pair of wattlebird fledglings (with quite
short tails) last night. This adds to the much more mature fledglings that
are still around after first being seen at the beginning of December. This
would make it 3 separate red wattlebird breeding “events” this summer, though I
can’t be sure any occurred within my GBS site as all records are of dependent
young.
Also interesting is that male Koel activity has been much more noticeable
over the past 24 hours, with two males seen and heard in a large gum in our GBS
site just after 7 pm. The fledgling was later heard about 250 m
away.
This is the first Koel breeding observation in my local area that I have
witnessed and interestingly comes after a summer of apparently reduced Koel
activity compared with the past few. While they have been calling in the
distance (close to or >1 km) intermittently, since Xmas I have only a single
record of one calling within 0.5 km about a fortnight ago.
Regards
Jack Holland
