Australia – Christmas Kisses and other creatures

I’m not quite sure how to present today. Dad hired a birding guide Doug Herrington, and it was a fabulous day. I think I’ll just give you a few of the highlights and maybe some observations otherwise, your eyes will glaze over.

Not only did we see many more birds (most of them called a yellow something or other) we also got to identify a few of their calls too.

We saw the Bower Bird again and bowers they build to attract a mate. They love pinky things (to match there breeding crests), hence the bottle tops amongst the artfully placed stones and bark in this picture.

Another bird, the Frogmouth. It’s a sort of cross between an owl and a nightjar. You really need to know where they are they are so well camouflaged. Can you see it below?

This is a Tawney Frogmouth and they are about a foot long. Below are two juveniles who haven’t quite got the hang of hide and seek yet! In case it’s not clear they are both looking to the left.

We also saw a Papuan Frogmouth which is much bigger too but, it was too high up to get a good photo.

While my Dad was planning this trip he found an Argentinian birdwatchers guide to the birds of Queensland, however some of the names were lost in translation. So the Mistletoe Bird became Christmas Kisses, the Butcher Bird became the Executioner so on and so forth. The below picture is Christmas Kisses and we saw a couple of these pretty things today.

I learned that some birds including our own songbird’s use spiders webs to build their nests. Below is the olive backed sunbird on its nest, glued by webs.

Doug asked if there was anything we really wanted to see and Dad told him we had ‘Missing Parrot Syndrome’. While we did get to see more of the parrots that comment made me think of Monty Python.

And talking of python’s how’s this?

An amethyst python snuggled up in the bird hide at abattoir swamp.
Also in the hide and not so snuggled up a brown tree snake. This is mildly venomous.

Then later on a track we were walking along was a 4 foot long Red bellied Black snake also venomous.

We also saw a lot of termite nests on the savannah areas. There are hundreds of types and they all build a different type of nest. I remember when I visited with Trish twenty years ago there were giant ones towering above us also but, these are considerably smaller.

On the slightly more cuddly front we saw an Agile wallaby too.

At the end of the day we had our bird total up to 121 species. An exceptional 50 more birds to add to our list.