A big Easter: Brisbane to Inglewood

So I spent a good deal of Easter this year birding (no real surprise there), and I had a fantastic run of luck while doing it. As the areas I visited are wildly different, and spread over several days, I'm splitting the blog post for Easter into three sections.

On the first day of Easter (the Thursday for me, it's great being your own boss!), I headed off after lunch towards Stanthorpe, sort of. The sort of is that I intended to make a run via Durakai and Coolmunda Dam on my way, which is a diversion of over 100km. Still, the birding at those places is great, and I still needed a few things from the area. Of interest on the way was a White-bellied Sea Eagle just before Aratula, feeding on something (possibly a turtle?) at a little wetland on the roadside. I also stopped at a dam on the right of the highway just outside of Warwick on the way to Durakai, as Andrew Stafford relates he once had an Australian Shelduck there, but sadly, no mega-rarities on the day I was there. At Durakai, things were very quiet. I had several groups of Speckled Warblers making their way around the little dam at the far end of the forest, and lots of dry woodland specialists like Brown Treecreeper and Little Lorikeet milling around, but nothing really great in the area.

Moving on, I arrived at Mosquito Creek Rd (marked as Mosquito Rd in Google Maps) near Coolmunda just before sunset. In that special golden light you get at the end of the day I drove down this dirt road for a magical twenty minutes as an array of rare and interesting birds flew by. My first big bird on the road was a single Squatter Pigeon. Now this is the exact bird I was there to see, but at first I wrote it off as a dark Common Bronzewing. But something tickled my brain and said I should go back and check it. It flushed off the side of the road and sure enough, it was a Squatter Pigeon - my first ever for the SEQ region and a big one for the year list. In the Brigalows lining the road a few Yellow-throated Miners competed for space with Noisy Miners, one of those fringe areas where both species occur together. From there I headed further down the road as flocks of Red-rumped Parrots and Bluebonnets moved along the road verges in front of me. In all, I had over 50 Bluebonnets, and extraordinary total given their supposed rarity in the region. The grassland in this part of the area is at present quite amazing - waist high and lush, I was sure I was going to find Emu, Bustard and all manner of other things out in the fields. Sadly, this wasn't to be on this visit, however I did find some large flocks of finches, including over 20 Plum-headed Finches, and a small number of Zebra Finches associating with them. White-winged Fairy-Wrens and Singing Bushlarks were also quite common in the area.

In all this was a very special afternoon, and though I had to make a dash for Stanthorpe to get there in time for dinner, I was very happy with the day.

Total birds to date: 295