birding-aus

Cassowaries etc

To:
Subject: Cassowaries etc
From: Phil & Sue Gregory <>
Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2011 20:16:51 +1000
Black Mountain Road, Kuranda
The male Cassowary still has his 3 chicks, now some 9 months old and due to be 
evicted any day as the female is coming around quite a bit and this is the 
usual prelude to mating. The chicks are squabbling amongst themselves and 
wandering off quite a bit on their own, but the hard times begin once the male 
chases them away from the core territory and they then have to forage in 
sub-optimal habitat along busy roads, with sub-divisons, dogs etc as hazards.  
All the optimal areas along this section of forest are already occupied.

It is pleasing that the chicks have got to this stage anyway, surviving cyclone 
Yasi and a very wet season, but there seems to be a fair bit of fruit about and 
the droppings are healthy and contain many seeds. We had a very tall rotten 
tree come down by the veranda yesterday, and the chicks have been feeding on 
the abundant fungi on the trunk, and also digging into the rotten wood, not 
sure quite what they are after as yet but they have left sizeable holes in the 
fallen trunk. 

2009 was a successful breeding failure as the 3 chicks  disappeared one after 
the other and all had gone by October, and 2008 was a total failure with a 
failed nesting attempt (probably due to wet cold weather), so 2007 was the last 
previous success. This male bred every year from 1998 to 2007, with usually 3 
chicks raised to independence. He has been here since at least 1985 so it's a 
pretty significant contribution to the breeding stock.

A project us under way to sample the DNA from droppings so as to tell the 
parentage, and to find whether much inbreeding is occurring. We hope to get a 
few samples from known individuals, and as they have a habit of depositing 
their offerings on the newly washed slates of the patio hopefully this won't be 
too hard.

Red-necked Crakes are about, usually seen late afternoon, and not vocal at this 
time. Barred Cuckooshrike are also around, and we have twice had Red-tailed 
Black Cockatoos flying over this month; Pacific Baza is occasionally vocal, I 
heard a Pied Currawong a couple of days ago which is very unusual here, and 
White-eared Monarch has been vocal too after an unusually prolonged absence 
with no records from Jan-mid-April.

Phil Gregory
www.cassowary-house.com.au


===============================

To unsubscribe from this mailing list,
send the message:
unsubscribe
(in the body of the message, with no Subject line)
to: 

http://birding-aus.org
===============================

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>
  • Cassowaries etc, Phil & Sue Gregory <=
Admin

The University of NSW School of Computer and Engineering takes no responsibility for the contents of this archive. It is purely a compilation of material sent by many people to the birding-aus mailing list. It has not been checked for accuracy nor its content verified in any way. If you wish to get material removed from the archive or have other queries about the archive e-mail Andrew Taylor at this address: andrewt@cse.unsw.EDU.AU