Kingfishers

The rainforest of Iron Range is rich in kingfishers and we caught several of a few species in the mist nets. The Azure Kingfisher above and the Little Kingfisher, below hunt fish in the small slow-flowing creeks. And although they look bright and boldly coloured when in the hand, they are very easily overlooked when they perch quietly on low branches above the water, often in deep shadow, low down as they are under the rainforest canopy. 



One of the more flamboyant kingfisher species is the Buff-breasted Paradise Kingfisher, below. These birds have spectacular long white tail-streamers which flash as the birds swoop through the lower layer of the rainforest. And these birds are migrants from Papua New Guinea. They all had freshly-grown flight feathers, including their tails, which must have been grown before they flew across the sea to Cape York.

The Buff-breasted Paradise Kingfishers hunt terrestrial animals on the forest floor. And like the other species they are difficult to see except for the white flash of their tails and backs as they dash through the trees.



On the road north

Northern Queensland is crocodile country - and they are there, lying quietly, watching.....

I kept a list of birds seen on the trip and there were 222 altogether. Here is a selection of some seen on the way north.

 Plumed Whistling Ducks Dendrocygna eytoni

 White-bellied Sea-eagle Haliaeetus leucogaster

 Squatter Pigeon Petrophassa scripta

 Australian Bustard Ardeotis australis

Golden-shouldered Parrot Psephotus chyrsopterygius

These parrots are rare and vulnerable to extinction as they live a specialised life. There might be about 2000 of these birds in the wild, eight of them in this one tree. They are restricted to nesting in cavities in termite hills which they did each year, and they feed in grassy wooded savanna which is often burned. If their habitat is lost, so will they.

Bush Stone-Curlews

During the past two weeks I have been in northern Queensland, on a trip to the Iron Range national park where I was part of a group banding birds. On the way north I flew into Cairns and went bird-watching in the local botanic gardens and adjacent cemetry - a well known haunt of Bush Stone-curlews Burhinus magnirostris.

These birds forage and breed quite happily on the short turf and bare patches of earth between the gravestones. Once a familiar bird in southern Australia, the stone-curlews are now rare wherever there are red foxes. These are European predators which were deliberately introduced by man over a hundred years ago. The foxes have not yet colonised the far north-east and the stone-curlews find sanctuary in this cemetery.

 A pair of stone-curlews lead their chick through the tombstones.

A group of six stone-curlews pass the middle of the day under the shade of a tree. They are nocturnal birds and their calls at night have an eerie beauty.

Bearded Dragon

This handsome male bearded dragon was out displaying today. He has a sulphur-yellow colour to his head, legs and upper tail, and a dark grey throat which he extends while bobbing his head. Another one I watched last week was doing this on the top of a high broken branch. Very spectacular.

 They have sharp spiked scales on their head, legs and along their flanks.

The spikes around their face are particularly long and sharp, all for defence and not only from predators, but from other male dragons.

In a previous blog page I showed a fierce fight between two male dragons. Here we can see the value of the spiked scales, even on the eyelids. Many of the scale tips are broken, he has some missing from his upper lip and chin, and there is a hole in his throat. All this was probably inflicted by an opponent in a fight with another male. Their teeth are obviously sharp and strong.

Brown Snake

This brown snake was out hunting today, the first I have seen this year. He was right next to a bird-watching hide at Kelly's Swamp in Canberra. I only saw two or three snakes last year, while I used to see two or three per day before the drought. Although it was a wet rainy year last year, their numbers had crashed during the previous several years of dry conditions, when there were few mice or frogs. The mice and frog numbers are high this year so hopefully the snakes will have a better time too.  

Brown snakes kill more people in Australia than any other snake, because they are common in suburbia and cleared woodland where people tend to walk. This one was well behaved though.

He was about three and a half feet long.