It
was a close call in the end. The thought
of trying to manage a blog site and compete in the new educational world of the
Australian Curriculum assumed rather daunting aspects with birding, or rather,
bird blogging, seemingly destined for a resounding defeat. Staffordshire
Stray is already hanging by the merest fingernail.
Then,
last week, I found the time and resolve to create a new Birds of Allen Road blog. It
came accompanied by a number of frustrations. On the other hand, they did
explain the messages I had been receiving suggesting that I was no longer using
a version supported by Google. When I updated as requested the blog was
published; in spite of the error message continuing to show!The main drain remained trying to fathom out what to write about, given a year’s absence from the bloggersphere. Allen Road was comparatively straightforward; it is one particular site, bordered by defined geographical limitations. The task was simply to outline the various species recorded here since the last post.
Birding South Burnet presents a
different set of problems. To begin
with, it is not one specific location but rather a conglomeration of 72
different areas and that includes the “South Burnett Strays,’ a collection of
birds recorded while travelling to a specific location within the region. Allen Road is a subset of this broader
site; Blackbutt State School is primarily a site of birds “heard only” while
teaching in the classroom or out on playground duty. Fay
and I remain the only birdwatchers with security clearance to monitor the birds
in and around Tarong Power Station but it actually combines almost a dozen
individual sites within the complex.
Habitats
vary: dry woodland and wet sclerophyll forests,
dense vine scrub; both bunya and hoop pine plantations; open farmland, both
grazing pasture and ploughed land; wetlands, primarily dams but also running
waterways such as Meandu Creek; disused railway lines and abandoned quarries;
sewage plants and mountain tops.
Distances
travelled to reach different sites vary, which directly effects the duration of
survey times, as it does the frequency of individual site surveys. The
percentage of bitumen to gravel roads also plays its part – and Fay appears to
have a genuine knack at finding us the most atrocious soft surfaces on which to
test the Forester. She surpassed all previous efforts when on 31
December 2012, during a return visit to the Gibson State Forest, she suggested
we explore the “top track” a little further.
By the time the track became a narrow, winding goat trail with large
boulders strewn liberally across our way we decided that discretion was perhaps
after a all the better part of valour.
To add insult to wounded ego, we came away with a miserable tally of
eight species.
It
would be smugly gratifying to sit here and boast that Fay and I have visited
all 72 sites during the past year; we haven’t.
Nowhere near that number! At last
count we have monitored only 37 since April 2012 and that includes newly
discovered sites such as the Darley Crossing Road [first noted in August 2012;
last revisited in November of that year].
Nor
has our monitoring been evenly distributed among those sites we have
visited. Twelve sites were covered on
just one occasion, although this paucity was not always of our own making; the
attempt to monitor the Kooralgin-Gilla Road on 10 February 2013 nearly ended in
a minor disaster when we hit a patch of deep mud from an overflowing
creek. It took some adroit manoeuvring
to extricate us out of that dilemma. The
Black-shouldered Kite Elanus axillaris
pair appeased the offended spirits somewhat.
A
number of former sites remain inaccessible since the January 2011 deluge; not
helped by a second, albeit slight less ferocious, downpour this January
[2013]. We will have to wait a while
longer to finally either confirm or put aside all thoughts of the eastern form
of the Star Finch Neochmia ruficauda.
On the
other hand this has forced other sites to become perhaps a little
over-represented but when the soul demands birding, access becomes a moot
point. The Nanango Fauna Sanctuary has
been monitored on 19 separate occasions; Berlin Road on 22, including yesterday
[21 April] when we were blessed with magnificent views of a Spotted Harrier as
it slowly glided across the road.
