Shining Bronze-Cuckoo and Varied Sitella

Andrew and I headed out to Samsonvale this morning to get some birding in and hopefully clean up a few easy and not so easy bush birds that can be found in the area. Before we began, Andrew wanted to see the Nutmeg Mannikins I found earlier in the week. Thinking this would be a quick and easy get for him, we headed up there early in the morning, only to have to wait 45 minutes before they finally came out in the open enough for a positive identification. Such is birding! At least Andrew came away with a new bird for the year. Samsonvale was surprisingly slow when we got there, and didn't really pick up all morning. We ran into Steve Murray at the cemetery on Gold Scrub Rd, another local birder, and he said he had only found 38 species since 5:30am. With Steve we headed off to look for some bush birds, and the first interesting thing we found was a White-throated Nightjar walking across the path in front of us! This was a very unusual find - not only are these birds nocturnal and shouldn't have been active, but the bird was walking and I've never heard of them doing this before. Sadly it flushed off the path without us managing to get a photograph (one step too close, very frustrating) and we weren't able to chase it into the bush. The nightjar was not new for the year of course, with out good views of the bird at JC Slaughter Falls earlier in the year, but it was the first time Andrew and I had seen one during the day, and it was a lifer for Steve, so it was probably a highlight of the day for all of us. Our next interesting find was Shining Bronze-Cuckoo, a new bird for both Andrew and I for the year. Apart from this we had some nice bush birds but nothing particularly interesting or rare. We stopped for lunch at the Buzz-Stop Cafe in Samford, owned by friends of Andrews, and once again, the food and conversation was great.

After lunch we dropped in on Roger McNeill, a friend of mine from the US who now lives in the foothills of Mt Glorious, near to Samford. He is running a B&B service out there, and his property is amazing, with birds like Painted Button-Quail and Spotted Quail-Thrush possible on the block. But today we were here to see an Owlet Nightjar that has been "reliable" in a hollow near his house. Of course, even though it was there yesterday, it was conspicuous by its absence today, so Roger has agreed to let us know when it turns up again. All was not lost though, as Roger led us down the hill near his place to look for bush birds, and we lucked onto his local Varied Sitellas, a bird that is not unusual near Brisbane, but is highly nomadic and often hard to find on purpose. We had one final surprise on our way out. Roger gave us instruction on where to try for Painted Button-Quail, and though we didn't find those, we managed to come across a very young Emerald Dove, only Roger's second record for the property. The bird was so young it still had buff lines and spotting in the wings and the metallic emerald colours they are so well known for were not fully developed. All in all this was a good day of birding, though not as productive as we'd hoped.

Total birds to date: 256