Archives for May 2014

The sparkling, golden eye of the shoveler caught my attention. It sparkled on the sparkling waters of the Goulds Lagoon on a sunny autumnal day. It had been a disappointing day for birds and now the shoveller, and the sun after clouds and rain, uplifted my spirits. Shovelers are one of my favourite birds and occasionally when I grow tired of the woodland birds nearer home I take a trip along the Brooker Highway to hunt out waterfowl, and particularly the shovelers. I don’t … [Read more...] about A shovelful of beauty

I’VE been an unabashed promoter of Bruny Island in the years I have been writing the “On the wing” column and now I’m delighted to learn that it has been named in a top-10 list of Australia’s most “revered” birdwatching sites. The list was compiled by Australian Birdlife magazine after it asked its 8000 readers to name their favourite birding locations. Bruny Island ranked among Kakadu in the Northern Territory and Lamington National Park in Queensland as bird hotspots. … [Read more...] about Bruny Island a bird mecca

The banded lapwing keeps to the shadows, or should I say to the furrows of ploughed field and rough pasture.  It’s the shy cousin to the more notorious of the lapwing and plover family, the masked lapwing which each spring makes the headlines when it dive-bombs unsuspecting people invading its space in suburbia’s open spaces. The masked lapwing, of course, is more commonly referred to as the “plover” in Tasmania and many people do not realise that it has a similarly-sized … [Read more...] about A bird of the farmland shadows

The sulphur-crested cockatoos had returned to Hobart earlier than usual, a big flock of them frolicking at the Waterworks Reserve towards the end of summer. There was drama in the air, however, when I discovered that one of the young cockies had been caught in a tree. The early return looked set to turn to tragedy. The cockies that we see in Hobart during the winter months tend to spend the summer feeding in the upper reaches of the Derwent Valley, and only return to the … [Read more...] about Lucky cockie flies free

MUTTONBIRDS once flew in such large flocks that they blotted out the sun and turned the ocean black when vast carpets of the seabirds settled on the waves. In 1798, English navigator and cartographer Matthew Flinders estimated that there were at least 100 million birds within a single flock sighted in Bass Strait. The abundance of the short-tailed shearwater – to give the species its common name used beyond Tasmanian shores – was compared at the time with the vast numbers … [Read more...] about Muttonbirds hit stormy seas