Cheynes beach trip report
April 26 – 28
Just got back from a quick visit to the Cheynes
Beach
Caravan Park located in the Waychinnicup National Park. Cheynes
Beach lived up to its reputation as a
reliable venue for twitching the elusive noisy scrub bird and the
western
bristlebird. In point of fact there are two noisy scrub birds
permanently
located within 400metres of the Caravan Park entrance. If you are lucky
the
scrub birds will occasionally make an appearance in the car park of the
reception area for the caravan park. The caravan park caretakers are
across the
latest gen regarding best locations and times to see the rarer species
and keep
an up to date book with the field notes and reports of birdos who have
been
visiting, which is a big help. They are pretty keen birdos themselves
are
therefore sympathetic to requests for info. They even lent me a CD to
help
identify the call of the bristlebird which was a real help.
However even with all the help in the world these
two
species are still a real challenge. Scrub birds of course are pretty
easy to locate
as their call really is ear-bleedingly loud. And they call non-stop all
day and
can be easily heard even from a distance of up to one kilometre.
Nevertheless they
are frustratingly difficult to view as they stay low and move quickly
by
scrambling through the undergrowth. Took over an hour to finally get a
tickable
observation. All up we located around six individuals and observed two.
The bristlebirds on the other hand were more
numerous but
considerably more difficult to locate. They are incredibly shy and
secretive
compared with their east coast cousins. All up we heard over a dozen of
the
birds but only saw three and only one of those was a tickable view. The
best
method seemed to be to walk quickly along the firebreaks just south of
the
caravan park in the hope of flushing one immediately adjacent to the
break and
hopefully to have it land in view.
Other highlights included spotted nightjars
hawking over the
beach in the evenings, tawny frogmouths, emu wrens everywhere, brown
quail on the
fire breaks, common and brush bronzewings almost
tame in the caravan park,
white-breasted robins also in the caravan park and red-capped parrots
in the
taller trees. A flock of short-billed black cockatoos roost in the
caravan park
at night. There are also western whipbirds around the park but they
were apparently
silent.
Cheers
David Kowalick
