I am writing this in Jervis Bay, New South Wales, where the weather is warm and nature abounds.
It’s lovely to finally get away after a year of being cooped up for various reasons, and it’s also great to be warm after such a long and cold winter.
A friend, Kylie, took me birdwatching in Sydney. I had forgotten how close national parks are to the thriving metropolis of Sydney, and I had also forgotten how much bush and mature trees exist in the suburbs.
I was staying near Parramatta and I heard a boobook owl calling from the bushland behind the Airbnb. Kylie took me to Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, which was quite glorious.
Unfortunately, we went on the day after Sydney experienced its wettest 24 hours of daily rainfall since 1879, and it was still raining for most of the morning, so the birds were sheltering from the deluge.
The scenery was nevertheless spectacular. When the rain stopped, a few birds presented themselves, such as two whistling kites that flew over us while we had lunch at Cottage Point, and the superb lyrebird that sang while we walked on the Koolewong Track. We spotted 38 species, which was a good day considering the weather.
We then visited the Blue Mountains where I tried in vain to see the only bird that is endemic to New South Wales, the rockwarbler. Armed with my guidebooks that pointed out the best places to view this cryptic little bird, I visited many rocky outcrops on the Blue Mountains and saw some spectacular scenery but not many birds at all, and definitely no rockwarbler.
I did enjoy birdwatching at the Blue Mountains Botanical Gardens where there were several dense gullies, and I saw many female satin bowerbirds, two eastern shrike-tits, a flock of striated thornbills, and many crimson rosellas. Two superb lyrebirds were also calling from deep in the gully, so I couldn’t manage a photo.
I received an email from Pete, who was walking in Ocean Grove Nature Reserve when he saw a pair of spotted pardalotes gathering grasses that they use to line their nest, which is a tunnel or hollow that they excavate in the ground.
Pete took a fantastic photo of this pair of birds. I asked Pete if he saw where their nest was and he said that he didn’t want to disturb the birds, so he took a photo and then left them alone, which is great. I am just interested in how cryptic birds are when building a nest while hiding the location.
I received an email from Ocean Grove local Alan, who is currently travelling in the west and north of Australia with his wife Anne. They flew to Christmas Island, which is an Australian territory near Indonesia.
Alan said that it’s an interesting island with very rugged terrain and rough seas, where the depth of the water drops off to hundreds of metres only a hundred metres offshore. Alan and Anne awoke the first morning at their sea-front motel unit to view hundreds of birds flying along the shoreline at sunrise with the prehistoric-looking frigate birds making it like a scene from Jurassic Park.
Whilst having a cuppa on the ground-level balcony of their room, a red-tailed tropicbird flew straight at the balcony, swooped down and walked into a bush only a couple of metres away and proceeded to regurgitate its catch to feed a chick.
The manager later told them that it returns each year to nest in the same place. Alan said that the red-footed boobies are so friendly that they wave at you for a photograph.
