G'day,
A photographer-friend of mine and his wife will be visiting me in SEQ
this coming January and they have both fairly recently developed a keen
interest in photographing birds. I would hope to spend as much time with
them as possible but I may have to leave them to their own devices for a
few days. I can recommend sites, etc., but what I would really like to
do is to be able to recommend hides (or "bird hides" as we strangely
call them) so that they can relax in an environment where they can view
birds closely and take photographs of interesting behaviour as well as
chalking up a range of species.
And I've got a bit out of touch with the quality of the hides available,
say between the Gold Coast, the Sunshine Coast and the Great Dividing
Range. I know well the Buckley's Hole and Kakadu Beach facilities on
Bribie Island but how about all of the others? For instance, what's now
happening to the hide at the Port of Brisbane, now that the information
centre / restaurant where you used to collect the key has been flattened?
I'd be really grateful if folk could send me, offline, details of any
hides that they're familiar with. Interesting aspects would be:-
Directions to the site and hide, quality of birds present, ease of
viewing and photographing these birds, comfort (seating, etc.) within
these hides, ease of access (whether wheelchair access available and
whether stairs are involved), whether seasonally or tide dependent for
interesting species to appear, etc., etc. It would also be good to know
of any hides, still described as worth visiting in local publications,
that are either dismantled or find themselves standing in the middle of
a dry field, far away from the wetlands once overlooked. "There is a
bird hide" doesn't really set expectations properly!
In the first instance I would just compile a document with bullet points
outlining any information I receive, or already know. I'd either send
this list to contributors or make it available to anyone who'd like to
see it, and then tidy everything up a bit after this first pass. Further
down the track I might even construct a more complete and polished
version as a pdf with a photo or two of hides and areas and make that
available; it depends on the response but I do think that it would be a
useful document to have in the birding domain.
Any thoughts / feedback?
Cheers - Trevor Ford.
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