This morning Leanne and I took the thermos of freshly brewed coffee up to Green
Mts [SEQ] for a 20 km stroll out to the border and back via the headwaters of
the Albert River.
The usual parrot feeding was going on as we left O'Reilly's and set off through
the rainforest. As usual, a couple of logrunners streaked across the track not
far from the end of the bitumen, and we had nice views of a pair of albert's
lyrebirds near the first nothofagus. One looked a bit small, so may have been
one of last year's hatchings. The brown cuckoo doves were in full voice, and we
flushed a couple of wonga pigeons.
Further along, I noticed a 'female' paradise riflebird pecking away, heard a
yasss and saw a male riflebird displaying to another 'female'. You don't get to
see riflebirds displaying that often, and certainly not with a closely attentive
audience, so we stopped to watch. A few moments later, the male dropped off his
perch, and blow me down, the two 'females' took turns to display to each other
[the second audibly flicking its wings'. On closer inspection, I noticed that
the back of one looked a tad downy and I realised that the mature male may well
have been giving dancing lessons to a couple of young chaps.
Heading around to Echo Pt, I had some more close encounters with the snakes - a
young carpet snake, an unidentified one that was slithering between my feet, a
whip snake and a very large and contented carpet snake right at the lookout [it
had a bandicoot sized bulge in its middle].
As we set off down the Albert River, I flushed a bird from the edge of the track
and discovered it to be a scraggly catbird - it was a recently fledged
individual, and had yet to get its head plumage [it had a rather ugly down
covered head] and the rest of its tail. Moving on, we flushed its sibling,
which was just as ugly.
The descent of the Albert River was as pleasant as always [I love those bubbling
brook sections] and we had lunch at the top of Lightning Falls [we the low water
levels, I could stand at the edge and look down into the depths of Black Canyon
and see the edge of the river].
We got really close [within 2 metres] to a bassian thrush near the junction of
the Albert River and Border tracks. It showed no white in its tail at rest and
a 1 cm patch of white on its outer tail feather in flight [took 50+ metres to
get it to fly.] Finally, as we approached the carpark, we heard a noisy pitta
heading off to work.
In the picnic ground, the turkeys were rolling around in the dirt and
sunbathing, while a pair of tourists were allowing a pair of satin bowerbirds to
eat from their pawpaw.
We came back via Duck Ck Road - there is more cleared land each time we traverse
it and the private section of the road has received a bit of maintenance. I
noticed a few needletails circling beside the road about 10 km south of
Beaudesert. We stopped for fuel at Beaudesert [they don't play silly buggers
with petrol prices there, and they were 11 cents a litre cheaper than Brisbane].
Finally, we saw a couple of weeros flying over the road about 5 km north of
Beaudesert, which I think is the closest I've seen them to the east coast
[normally, their eastern boundary is Boonah - Lockyer valley.]
Regards, Laurie.
Birding-Aus is on the Web at
www.shc.melb.catholic.edu.au/home/birding/index.html
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send the message
"unsubscribe birding-aus" (no quotes, no Subject line)
to
|
