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Hi Everyone.
Once again my mate Janis and I went out a-huntin'
Regent Honeyeaters and Swift Parrots, but if those birds were in the Central
West of NSW this weekend, they nicked off when they saw us coming. As usual, we
will file a nil sightings return.
We covered a fair amount of country, from Dubbo to
Mendooran, then east for a ways, then north towards Gilgandra, and up and down
many back roads in the area. We found some areas of great roadside remnant
vegetation, a fair amount containing the shrubby casuarinas that our local
Glossy Black-Cockatoos favour, complete with lots of "chewings" to show
that the Glossies HAD been through. Interesting to see, in the carpet of chewed
cone fragments, a mix of ages, with some older chewings faded to grey-white
and the fresher ones yellow to orange.
Of course we couldn't go through from Dubbo to
Mendooran without calling in to Goonoo State Forest, so we did a forest search
for Regents/Swifties. The forest looked soft and green, much more so than the
surrounding countryside which is suffering from lack of rain - but the forest
may have benefited from the patchiness of recent showers. There was no blossom
on the ironbarks, and no lerps that we could see. Another main interest of ours,
the casuarinas, looked healthy and were loaded with cones of varying stages of
development.
As I said, no luck with our search for the elusive
Regents and Swift Parrots, , BUT we saw Malleefowl.
We intended to just go check out a mound to see how
deeply it was excavated, and if there were any old and unhatched eggs (it
happens sometimes) ~ that sort of boring stuff. To our astonishment there was
not just one, but TWO Malleefowl scratching away in the excavated mound, and
around the edges. An amazing sight in May, when this pair should have still
been on holiday, acting lazy and getting fat, before beginning
the hard work of raking up debris and refilling the mound sometime in June
or July. (See my post, 'Malleefowl in Goonoo', of 5 July 2001) We thought that
recent good rain (there were lots of puddles and moss on the ground) might have
been a trigger for HIS mounding instincts, but have no idea why SHE was on the
scene. We didn't want to disturb them, so didn't go in close enough
to see if he had started to rake up a windrow of fallen leaves and litter. Last
year the mound was full of litter by July 5, which was a few weeks earlier than
is usual here... are the Goonoo Malleefowl starting work earlier and
earlier?
As I'm fond of saying: The only thing certain about
bird watching is that nothing's certain! (Tony Russell thinks I pinched that
saying from him but I didn't, honest Tony... though I would have, if I'd
know that you use it too!)
Judie Peet (Dubbo NSW)
(The only thing certain about bird watching is that
nothing's certain!)
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