and pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space
I have become a bit of a fan of dark backgrounds. At Braeside Park the other day found a few opportunities to frame a bird in the light against a background in shadow. That’s not to say I reject all other opportunities.
At one place I had the sun behind me, brightly lit water to my right and water in shade to my left. A Hoary-headed Grebe swam from the light into the shadow giving me the chance to shoot high key followed by low key. Which do you prefer? Let me know.
A happy and prosperous new year to everyone who deserves it, which is almost everyone after subtracting the despotic, criminal and corrupt.
January the first. A new calendar game. Go for quantity or quality? Early to bed last night up at four this morning. I decided on some forest birding and headed about 90 minutes drive east of Melbourne to Mount Worth State Park. Tall forest of Mountain Ash with Blackwood beneath and Tree Ferns in between. Epiphytic ferns on everything and enough fungi to poison your whole family. Beef Wellington anyone?
The first birds on the list were quintessentially Australian – King Parrot, Laughing Kookaburra and Australian Magpie. First native mammal was a Wombat running for its life. They run with rather more grace than you would expect such a short legged stocky creature.
The list extended to just 21 bird species but included Lyrebird and Large-billed Scrubwren and it’s unlikely that I’ll see them again until late in the year.
For a nice introduction to the trails in the park click this <LINK> but be aware that the Giants Circuit is currently closed (cos Parks Vic, what can I say).
Yeah, the big smoke for Christmas and the new year. So last visit to Braeside Park for 2025. Some of the locals were prepared to pose …
Your word of the day is Fuliginous. You’ll never guess what it means. I suspect that trying to broaden your vocabulary by a word a day type strategy will only lead to a collection of words that no one has ever heard spoken and are too unwieldy for Scrabble. But yes, fuliginous means sooty. The root is Latin.
The rocks are fuliginous and the bird is fuliginous. What better way to show off the red bits? It’s the Sooty Oystercatcher. The first of its group to be described was the Eurasian Oystercatcher, Linnaeus 1758. It was the red bits that inspired the genus he created for it, Heamatopus, from the Greek, blood and foot. No surprise then that the Sooty Oystercatcher is Haematopus fuliginosus.
Currently there are eleven species of Oystercatcher, a twelfth, from the Canary Islands, was last collected in 1913 (ain’t science wonderful). Any survivors were gone by the 1940’s. Not to worry I’m sure there’s a committee somewhere on the verge of splitting an existing species. And indeed the Sooty is a candidate. There is a northern subspecies, Haematopus fuliginosus ophthalmicus which is a little smaller than the southern subspecies and has a yellow/orange eye ring. Here is a pair photographed in Broome, WA.
The Sooty can be distinguished from the Australian Pied Oystercatcher by its all black plumage. It prefers rocky coasts but I have seen them probing sand on beaches. The girls are heavier and have longer and more slender bills. The boys, with shorter stouter bills, have a higher proportion of shelled creatures in their diet. Parents help feed their young. This is unusual in shorebirds and is likely due to the difficulty involved in prizing molluscs off rocks and breaking open their shells with immature bills.
Merry Christmas one and all. If that’s not your thing then have a super solstice. If Judaism is your thing then hug your family my thoughts are with you. What a world. Слава Україні. Good luck to Greenland. The new year is only a week away – let’s hope we make it.
Here’s an Australian Magpie celebrating with a berry.
More formally the Hooded Plover, Thinornis cucullatus, surpassed in cuteness only by the Giant Panda (and even then only if the Panda is in a playful mood). There are two populations. In south-eastern Australia they are entirely coastal. The Western Australian population enjoy the coast but also wander inland onto salt lakes. They like broad beaches backed by dunes where they nest on the ground above the high tide mark.
The population is declining, the IUCN lists them as near threatened. The main problem for the Hoodies is that they breed at the same time hordes of people descend on their beaches. The adults are able to look out for themselves but the youngsters are very vulnerable especially to dogs. Very few make it to maturity.
If you come across some of the many volunteers that endeavour to protect the hatchlings do spare them an encouraging word or two. Most will soon need counselling because their charges have come to grief.
In old colonial times there was a cheap cloth imported from China and sold in Oz as Nankeen. You could have any colour you wanted so long as you wanted a reddish brown. In time it became a handy descriptor of reddish brown and found its way into the name of two Ozzie birds, The Nankeen Kestrel and the Nankeen Night Heron. These names have survived the attempts of august committees to erase them and I hope they endure forever.
The Nankeen Kestrel is found throughout Australia and further afield in the Pacific. It is one of two Australian raptors that are really proficient at hovering, the other being the Black-shouldered Kite. I encountered this one on Griffiths Island.
Port Fairy is surrounded by volcanoes. The nearest and most recent at about 35,000 years is Tower Hill. To the north a bit further away and older there are Mt Rouse and Mt Eccles. Western Victoria has many other volcanoes which together constitute the Newer Volcanics. They are dormant, which is good, but not necessarily extinct which would be better perhaps.
Mt Rouse has made a major contribution to Port Fairy. It went off about 50,000 years ago and it’s about 60km away as the lava flows. And it flowed in abundance. Many of the older buildings, including our home here, are built of the stuff and the beaches are littered with it.
It comes in really handy for the bird photographer aiming for some low key shots – just frame up your subject against the basalt.
Roebuck Bay is undoubtedly the shorebird capital of Australia but Victoria has sufficient to keep the diagnostic skills in shape. As well, it often seems to me that they are more approachable down here. Summer is the time when the locally breeding species are reinforced by the migrants from the Arctic.
The photo above shows a Common Greenshank (not common around here, mate) that has come up nicely in black and white. Just as well, it was shot in awful light and looked shocking in colour! Below some other waders that I’ve found in the last couple of weeks.
The Red-capped Plover, Pied Stilt and Hooded Plover breed locally. The remainder are long distance migrants.
In the dry and dusty prose of taxonomy it reads “Gallinago hardwickii (Gray, JE 1831)”. The specimen described by Mr Gray was collected by Captain Charles Browne Hardwick (1788–1880) who may have had an e on the end of his surname. He shot the unfortunate snipe somewhere in Tasmania. Today we know it as Latham’s Snipe. The Latham in question seems to have had no connection whatsoever with the snipe (or to have ever been rude about conga lines). He was John Latham an English physician and ornithologist back in the day. Getting rid of eponymous bird names is something of a trend in modern taxonomy. By and large I think that’s a shame but finding a more appropriate name for this bird wouldn’t offend me at all.
G. hardwickii breeds in Hokkaido and highland areas of Honshu in Japan, and in Sakhalin and the nearby Kuril Islands. It escapes the northern winter by migrating through New Guinea and northern Australia arriving in South-eastern Oz in October. It can be found, if you look very carefully, in marshy habitats until departing in February or March on the return journey.
They feed dusk to dawn and hunker down through the day in places where not a lot of people choose to walk. Add to that their beautiful camouflage and you can easily miss them.
Migration is a strategy that comes with certain risks, problems on the breeding ground, the wintering ground or on the journey between them. For Latham’s Snipe the main hazards are here in Australia. Their population falls after major bush fires and droughts and they are further squeezed by urban development.
They are not easy to photograph. If they are out in the open they won’t let you get close. If they are in good cover the first you know of them as you wade through their territory is an explosive “chack” as they fly rapidly away.
bobmcgee 