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Evening, folks.
The Norwegian Blues (my parents and I) have
volunteered to go looking for Painted Snipe on 7 July as part of the Painted
Snipe winter survey that Chris Tzaros mentioned on Birding Aus a few days
back. Thanks,said the organisers, how would you like to do Werribee
(Western Treatment Complex)? OK, so we have a day to find all the Painted
Snipe in 10,000 hectares of wetland likely to be full of all sorts of other
birding distractions. Challenging... We will need to be a bit
selective.
I'd be grateful for any suggestions that Birding
Aus correspondents might have about where we should focus our efforts. In
particular, has anyone ever seen a Painted Snipe at Werribee? If so,
where? - that might give us a good starting point. Based on my reading of
the field-guides, and in the total absence of any personal experience with the
species, I was thinking of concentrating on the shallower lagoons with banks and
patches of emergent vegetation, such as those towards the eastern end of "Area
3" (defined on the WTC Melbourne Water bird-watching permit), plus shallow
vegetated ditches and areas like the eastern end of Paradise Road lagoons.
Any comments on this strategy (if that's the word) would be
welcome.
Couple of recent mildly interesting observations:
at least half a dozen Long-billed Corellas at Kiloran Park, Mooroolbark, a
Peregrine Falcon at Bayswater shopping centre and a flock of about twenty Cattle
Egrets near the corner of Burwood and Mountain Highways, Wantirna South, last
Saturday morning, and a similar sized flock of Cattle Egrets at Lilydale this
afternoon.
Regards, and thanks in advance for any
advice,
Jack
Krohn
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