Trevor's Birding

An unusual visitor

No Comments »10th September, 2017; Category: Kingfishers, Bush birds, Garden birds, Magpies and Currawongs, Murray Bridge

Laughing Kookaburra

Garden Birds

On my database, I record the birds I see in our garden, or on our five-acre block, or flying overhead. I have done this every month for well over 30 years now. In more recent times, I have started recording them on a weekly, and sometimes daily, occasions. This has built up a great base of information about the birds we have resident (present every day), regular visitors (every few weeks or months) and occasional (perhaps one or two sightings a year). So far, the tally is over 110 different species. (I don’t know the exact figure because my database is not quite up to date.)

Rare Visitors

Surprisingly, one of the rarer occasional visitors is the Laughing Kookaburra. This species is widespread throughout southern and eastern Australia and is common in many places. It is a widespread species here in the Murray Bridge region of South Australia too, especially along the Murray River. Despite that, it is a rare visitor to our garden. In fact, until a few weeks ago, our last sighting was just over ten years ago.

Harassment

The individual which paid us a recent visit did not have a good time. As I was getting some photos – shown on today’s post – a Grey Currawong kept on harassing it until it flew off in disgust at the poor welcoming party. I guess that the Currawong chased the kookaburra away to discourage it from visiting its nest, though I have not seen any evidence of the Grey Currawongs nesting so far this year. The Currawong itself is not slow about robbing the nests of other birds, either.

Further Reading:

Grey Currawong – Birds in Backyards site
Laughing Kookaburra – Birds in Backyards site
Lunch Snatching Kookaburra
A Laughing Kookaburra comes to lunch

Grey Currawong

Laughing Kookaburra

Spring – where are you?

No Comments »7th September, 2017; Category: Bush birds, Cuckoos, Nests

Horsfield’s Bronze-cuckoo

It is supposed to be spring here in southern Australia.

The calendar says so, but the weather is not cooperating. Since the beginning of “spring” at the start of September, the weather has been anything but spring-like. In fact, it has been decidedly wintery for the whole month. And August was no better. This year both August and September (so far) have been like the winter we didn’t have earlier on. We had more than double our monthly average rainfall in August and this month looks like going the same way.

To be fair – the earlier months this year were very dry. Large parts of South Australia were heading for a drought, along with other parts of eastern Australia which are still in severe drought. The farmers need all the rain they can get to establish their crops and pastures. The environment also needs the seasonal rains. During the earlier parts of winter, we had very cold nights and lovely sunny days. Now we still have very cold nights – and cold showery days as well. It hasn’t been good weather to get out birding.

A sign of Spring on the way?

A few days ago – on a brief few moments out in the garden between showers and wind gusts – I managed to both hear, and then get good views of, a Horsfield’s Bronze-cuckoo (see photo above). This species spends autumn and winter in the north of Australia and migrates south to breed around this time of the year.

The 14 species of cuckoos present in Australia are parasitic breeders. They lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, including thornbills, wrens and a range of other species. The parent cuckoos leave all the incubation, feeding and raising of the young to the host species. You could say that they have perfected the art of “out-sourcing” parenthood.

Further reading:

Happy 12th Birthday to Trevor’s Birding

No Comments »3rd September, 2017; Category: Birders, Camera, Photos

Peaceful Doves are a regular visitor in our garden

Happy Birthday!

Today marks the 12th anniversary of Trevor’s Birding.

It is hard to imagine that 12 years have passed since I started on this amazing journey. I had no idea at the time where it would take me.

Oh, the places I’ve been,
And the birds I have seen,
From the parrots and doves,
And the eagles above.

To ravens and crows
And finches in rows,
The lorikeets too
And kingfishers blue –
I’ve noted them all
Both big and so small.

My camera has taken
A wide range of birds,
Shown here on this blog
Along with my words.

Yes – I’ve been birding in many places on four continents and in seven countries: Australia, Thailand, Nepal, Ethiopia, Morocco, Spain and Malaysia. Many of the photos taken have been shared here on this site. I hope there will be many more in the years to come.

I have written over 1750 articles over those years and I am planning far more in the years to come. I have no idea how many photos I have taken, nor how many I have shared here on this site. I know that I have taken well over 10,000 photos on my camera. I estimate that I have probably shown about 4000 of them here.

On the strength of what I have written here and the photos I have shared, I have had many requests by various groups to be a guest speaker about birds. This is something I really enjoy and hope to do more of in the years to come.

Instead of writing about a particular bird today, I am going to finish this article by posting some of my favourite photos.

Enjoy.

Crested Pigeon

Silver Gull, Pt Elliot, South Australia

Noisy Miner

Female Galah, Laratinga Wetlands

Sacred Kingfisher

Beautiful Mallee Ringneck Parrots

1 Comment »19th July, 2017; Category: Bird Behaviour, Garden birds, Parrots and Lorikeets

Mallee Ringneck Parrot

Over recent years we have had a family of Australian Ringneck parrots move into our garden. Before that, they were only occasional visitors, but now we see – or hear – them every day. They can be raucous at times. I now consider them to be a resident breeding species in our garden. In fact, only last week I witnessed two of them mating, so we could have even more around in the next few months. They have been constantly investigating a large hollow in one of our mallee trees. The birds we have here are the sub-species Mallee Ringnecks.

At first, we only had two birds, but after breeding, there were more, and now we often count up to about eight birds in our garden, or in the nearby mallee scrub. They chatter away noisily in the nearby trees, often disturbing the peacefulness of our edge of town block of land. We don’t really mind because we love having them around. That is – until they attack our ripening pears, chewing around the stems of each piece of fruit. Each summer I have to drape netting over the trees to minimise the damage.

Last week I was going out the sliding door on to our back veranda. I was heading out to sit in the weak winter sun to do some reading. One of the parrots flew from the nearby tree towards the house just as I came out of the door. It was flying directly towards me, wings and tail spread out fan-like as it came to a stop, landing on the edge of the roof guttering. As the feathers spread out, I glimpsed the beautiful colours of this lovely bird. Sadly, I didn’t have my camera – it happened far too quickly, anyway.

The photo at the top of this post shows the colourful feathers of one of our birds which accidentally flew into my office window last year. It sat on the ground quite stunned for a few minutes before flying off again. The photo below shows another shot of the same bird.

Further reading:

Australian Ringneck parrot

Birding along the River Murray

No Comments »10th June, 2017; Category: Waterbirds, Coots and Moorhens, Murray Bridge

Black Swan, Murray Bridge

A few weeks ago I participated in the Global Big Day. This was a special birding day held all over the world. Participants went out birding in their local patch. This could be your own garden, a nearby park, or a little further away. I decided to visit six of my favourite local birding sites, starting with my own garden. It was an interesting and relaxing afternoon. I visited several spots I had not been to in quite a while. Naturally, my camera came with me.

One of my birding sites was Sturt Reserve here in Murray Bridge, South Australia. This reserve, about five kilometres from my home, incorporates large grassed picnic areas along the River Murray. At this point, the river is quite wide and affords good views of quite a range of water birds, including ducks, coots, swamphens, cormorants, darters, pelicans and grebes.

The picnic areas have some old growth gum trees which are favoured spots for a range of parrots, cockatoos, honeyeaters and magpies. To the south of the reserve, there are several shallow lagoons. These generally fill up due to run-off from land nearby during rain. They would also be filled if the river ever flooded. There may even be a way for water to enter these lagoons directly from the river, but I am not aware if this actually happens.

These lagoons also attract a range of water birds. On my special day out birding, I saw Black Swans (see photo above).

As well as the swans I also recorded the following species:

Please note that if you click on any of the above list of birds, it will take you to more articles and photos of those species.

Dusky Moorhen (left) and Eurasian Coot (right)

Purple Swamphen

Part of the lagoon south of Sturt Reserve, Murray Bridge