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
===============================
www.birding-aus.org
birding-aus.blogspot.com
To unsubscribe from this mailing list,
send the message:
unsubscribe
(in the body of the message, with no Subject line)
to:
===============================
|
