A slight diversion

So, this was meant to be my big post, about reaching 300. I had it all planned out. I was driving to Townsville with a friend of mine, and on the way I was going to see Grey Goshawk at Coolum, Black-breasted Button-Quail and many others at Inskip Point, and basically have knocked off 6/7ths of the year's list by March. Sadly, the weather had other ideas. Our drive up the coast was so miserable we had to cancel both Inskip Point and Eungella and just head straight for Townsville. Now don't get me wrong, I love birding around Townsville, but Eungella holds a special place in my heart, and Inskip is still within my 250km area so I was a little dirty about it all to say the least. Still, I did get some good birding in at Paluma, north of Townsville.

I went up there for a day with local birder Duan Biggs, who despite being an international guide and quite a skilled birder, is still missing a couple of local birds. Our target for the day, if you can call such difficult birds targets, was Red-necked Crake. There had been one seen within the last week, and Duan felt it was his time to find one, having stood metres from calling birds in the past without seeing them (a frustration I know well from trying to find Rufous Scrub-birds). Despite a valiant effort searching, we failed to find a crake, though we did hear one calling, thus adding to Duan's frustration. On the way we did manage to find most of the local endemic species - Bower's Shrike-Thrush, Tooth-billed Bowerbird, Grey-headed Robin, Chowchilla, Macleay's Honeyeater, Victoria's Riflebird.

Actually, speaking of Riflebirds, we saw something pretty amazing while we were there - a lek of juvenile male Riflebirds practicing their displaying. Apparently young males often congregate in groups to practice their mating dances, with one taking the part of the male, and another pretending to be a female. Then they swap. Our birds were using the cross-bars on powerpoles to display, and in all I counted eight birds flitting around and doing silly dances. It was pretty amazing! Also amazing was having a male Superb Fruit-Dove land in a tree above us and sit in the open feeding for a while. You may remember back to my pathetic but "good enough" views of Superb Fruit-Dove from near Yandina earlier in the year. Well prior to this trip I'd never really had much better views. Once at Julatten I had a male fly overhead but not perch, a couple of times at Eungella I identified birds by call and then saw them 30m up in the canopy, but certainly not what you would call a "life view". Well I can now say I've seen a male Superb Fruit-Dove in the wild as well as I'm likely to ever see one, and I'm pretty happy about that. Another highlight was the abundant and bold Noisy Pittas in the area. These are birds that are easy enough to see around Brisbane, in fact I saw mine for the year at Lacey's Creek back in January. However, easy to see and easy to see well are not the same thing at all. At Paluma at one stage I had a Noisy Pitta bouncing along a driveway only 10m away from me, completely in the open. It hung around for about 30 minutes while we watched the lek of Riflebirds and got bored of seeing the pitta so well. Actually, I lie, I would never get bored of seeing a pitta that well, but it wasn't the Red-necked Crake, so we eventually moved further on.

A point of interest for me was that Duan was surprised by the presence of Satin Bowerbirds in great numbers. I was a little surprised to see one - I don't believe I had seen one in my previous visits to the area, and I was aware they were pretty rare in Eungella so figured it would be the same here. Well, in the course of the day we probably saw more than 30 Satin Bowerbirds, all females and young males, no males in adult plumage at all. We even found two bowers with blue objects and attendant males doing mimicry and dancing. Duan said he had once before seen Satin Bowerbirds in the area, but they were quite rare, so I'm not sure what is going on there but it could be of some interest.

A few days after Paluma, Duan gave me a ring and said he wanted to do some wader watching, which I was all for, seeing as how waders are kind of my specialty. The target for the day was Wandering Tattler, but we started by looking for flocks of roosting waders near the mouth of the Ross River. Turns out the day we went was a pretty major tide, and while we did find a flock of about a thousand birds, they were on a sandbank so far away as to be unidentifiable. On the bright side, while we were there a radio station promotional car stopped and gave us a doughnut and an iced coffee for free, which was pretty awesome. Our next tactic was to head to the breakwater for the river mouth, and walk along the groyne. This proved to be highly successful. We started out with great views of a pair of grey-morph Eastern Reef-Egrets, and some young Striated Herons. As we walked further down the groyne we started seeing Green Turtles, mostly youngish ones, maybe half the size of adults or smaller. Finally, as we neared the end of the breakwater we got lucky and flushed three Wandering Tattlers which gave their diagnostic calls immediately, saving us the effort of trying to puzzle out their other, more difficult ID features. We had prolonged views of the birds resting within less than five metres away from us, easily the best views I've ever had of this species, though we had to be pretty careful to get views that good. Our day was topped off by a close fly-past of a Brahminy Kite, and a group of three Sooty Oystercatchers, plus more Turtles on the way back. In all a very satisfying end to a wonderful if brief trip.

Total birds to date: STILL 293

Image 1: Immature male Victoria's Riflebirds practicing displaying, the H-Trail, Paluma
Image 2: Male Superb Fruit-Dove, the H-Trail, Paluma
Image 3: Noisy Pitta, the H-Trail, Paluma
Image 4: Wandering Tattlers, Ross River breakwater, Townsville