Yesterday I had a great day's birding with an English visitor, spending a
relatively cool misty morning in the Capertee Valley before the sun broke
through and it got searingly hot, then taking in Lake Wallace (Wallerawang)
and a few Blue Mountains sites in the afternoon. Some observations from the
day include:
The flowering mistletoe in the Capertee Valley is still drawing many
honeyeaters and yesterday, during a fairly short visit to my block I noted
the arrival of two species which have been conspicuously absent until now,
Yellow-faced and White-naped Honeyeaters (along with some Little Corellas
in the front paddock this has brought the property list up to 93). Striped
Honeyeaters are showing well and Eastern Spinebills are in
uncharacteristically high numbers in many parts of the valley. It seems
quite likely that the odd Regent Honeyeater could also turn up in these
sort of conditions, though not necessarily easy to find with so much
mistletoe around.
At Lake Wallace, despite four Musk Ducks, a few Great Crested Grebes and
thousands of Eurasian Coots, some of the other usual waterbird numbers were
well down. For example Hoary-headed Grebes were almost absent and I only
saw 2 Grey Teal. I suspect this may be due to birds having moved to areas
of flooding in the inland. However, the fact that it was Sunday could also
have been a factor with the boats etc. causing most of the birds to
concentrate at the far side of the lake where they were harder to see.
Throughout the day we were able to get great views of all three local
treecreepers, with my visitor particularly enjoying watching Red-browed
Treecreepers searching amongst the ribbons of hanging bark on Eucalyptus
cypellocarpa in a Blue Mountains gully.
We finished the day on a great note with six Glossy Black-Cockatoos showing
off their brilliant tails as they took flight and about the same number of
Yellow-tailed Black-Cockatoos, seen at Kings Tableland.
This morning, at home in Katoomba I noticed the first Yellow-faced
Honeyeaters since spring, moving through with Spotted and Striated
Pardalotes. The Rockwarbler I wrote about two weeks ago is still visiting
my garden every day. Its relatively dull tawny throat indicates it's a
young bird.
Cheers
Carol
Carol Probets
Katoomba
Blue Mountains NSW
(100km west of Sydney)
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