Favourite Birding Spots #1 Home

Over the coming weeks I plan to include posting of some of my favourite birding spots. My all time favourite has to be our own garden, because that is where I spend most of my time. For any new readers of this blog, home is a five acre (2 hectare) block of mainly mallee scrub on the outskirts of Murray Bridge. Our home town is a regional centre in rural South Australia and is about 50 minutes drive to the CBD of Adelaide, our state capital city. Adelaide is 2 hours by plane west of Sydney.

Mallee Scrub, Murray Bridge

We have lived here now for over 20 years and love it. The house is surrounded by mallee scrub as shown in the photo above. Over the years we have also planted many hundreds of trees and shrubs, all of them Australian native plants except for the fruit trees in our orchard and a small rose garden. Because we have so many plants near the house we have a very healthy population of resident birds and many occasional visitors too.

Record Keeping

I am a keeper of lists. That’s just my nature. So birding is a wonderful hobby. I have all sorts of lists of birds. When I bought a bird database for my computer in the early 1990s my birding interest took off after being in limbo for a few years. I have kept a monthly list of birds seen in our garden (or flying overhead) since moving here in late 1984. For while I was keeping a weekly list. All of these lists can be easily accessed on my computer.

Mallee Scrub, Murray Bridge

Resident Species

There are many species that I have recorded as resident species, that is, they are always present in the garden or in the scrub. Over the years I have recorded 112 species in total. Of these some 36 I would regard as resident species, that is, they are always present or they frequently fly overhead. Those marked with an asterisk are introduced species.
The resident species include:

• Straw-Necked Ibis
• Black-Shouldered Kite
• Nankeen Kestrel
• Brown Falcon
• Collared Sparrowhawk
• Black Kite
• Rock Dove*
• Spotted Turtledove*
• Crested Pigeon
• Galah
• Mallee Ringneck
• Purple Crowned Lorikeet
• Welcome Swallow
• Black-Faced Cuckoo-Shrike
• Common Blackbird*
• Willie Wagtail
• Grey Shrike-Thrush
• White-Browed Babbler
• Yellow Rumped Thornbill
• Weebill
• Spotted Pardalote
• Striated Pardalote
• Singing Honeyeater
• White Plumed Honeyeater
• Brown Headed Honayeater
• Spiny Cheeked Honeyeater
• New Holland Honeyeater
• Red Wattlebird
• Magpie Lark
• White-Winged Chough
• Grey Butcherbird
• Australian Magpie
• Grey Currawong
• Little Raven
• Common Starling*
• House Sparrow*

There are many more species that are occasional visitors or seasonal visitors. For example, The Rainbow Bee-eater is only present in the spring and summer, and not every year. There is yet another group of birds that I would regard as vagrants; I’ve only recorded them on one or two occasions. A classic example of this is a single Australian Pelican flying high overhead. They are very common along the River Murray some 5km away, but not where we live.