some nice birds "down south"

["Peter Miller via Canberrabirds " <>]

Hi all,

Spent a very enjoyable weekend wandering up grassy creek valley and thence onto the ridge that leads up onto Sentry Box Mountain on the south western border of ACT/NSW.

Ostensibly we were there to collect some rogaine controls on the Sunday, but of course some birding was done as well.

Things were quite quiet on the Saturday afternoon although we did have one largish mixed flock of honeyeaters (40?) which included White-Naped, Yellow-Faced, Fuscous, Brown-Headed, and White-eared as well as some Grey Fantails and Striated and  Buff-rumped Thornbills mixed in.

The highlight of Saturday was very unexpected as we were most of the way up the ridge that leads to the flatish summit bowl which takes you to the top of the Sentry Box when we heard quite a loud "Tu-whit" call. I'm not very good at calls so not recognising it was not that surprising but what was surprising was when I first glimpsed it it was a relatively large bird with a long-tail held cocked-up. After a little bit of squinting through the shrubbery it obliged with lovely views showing off its quite warm orange/chestnut chest with scalloping-it was indeed a pilotbird- hanging around at about 1500m which seemed surprisingly high but HANZAB does note it occasionally occurs high up. It was interesting that in the same area that there was an exceptional amount of wombat activity, much poo, many burrows, lots of tracks. It was in thick re-growth-teatree mainly, but with some more open grassy areas in the vicinity. Again HANZAB notes they like dense re-growth Eucalypt forests, although this one was almost above the tree-line being mostly shrubby under-story with very little over-story. A very nice bird; I thought I saw another one this morning even higher up on the ridge but the view was very fleeting and I wouldn't swear by it. 

After that, anything today was going to be a bonus, but we had two more great birds, much closer to the Boboyan Rd on Pheasant Hill. First was a pair of Spotted Quail-thrushes which are always nice to see, and then for me at least even better was a family group of 3 or 4 Crested Shrike Tits, with some feeding of a juvenile still going on. We watched them foraging on the hanging bark and chasing around and generally having a grand time-at least so it appeared to us.

Full list on ebird shortly.

Hope everyone else had enjoyable birding weekends too!

cheers,

Peter

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