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Hi Shirley,
If it's any comfort, my first Baillon's Crake was a
fresh but very dead road-kill which I found outside the Cheetham Saltworks near
Altona in 1986, when I was 15 and living in Melbourne. I didn't come across a
real live specimen until a very dry couple of years resulted in numerous B. and
Spotless Crakes invading the Sherwood Arboretum, in Brisbane's western suburbs,
in October 1994.
This situation was repeated here this summer, and
between November/December 2001 I found them on
several wetlands around Brisbane - as crakes go, they're not particularly shy.
They were also easy around the Hawkesbury swamps in north-west Sydney around
this time, especially Pitt Town Lagoon and McGrath's Hill. Not that this helps
you much in poor old Melbourne, but I guess what I'm getting at is, it's only a
matter of time before the floodgates open!
Cheers, AS
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