snape reserve
These are a few rough notes about the Birds Australia survey and campout held at Snape Reserve over the Labour Day long weekend (12th to 14th March 2005).
First, my thanks to Keith at BA, Lindsay from TFN, and all the people who made the weekend such a success.
Second, I apologise for the quality of some of the shots that follow. Although we were there for two and a half days, it was only on the last half-day that I got the chance to do any serious photography. (We were, after all, supposed to be there to do the survey.) I don't much like displaying poorish photographs for all the world to see, but (for possibly the first time ever!) I've resisted the temptation to pull better shots out of my files. These were all taken on the weekend, most of them on the Monday morning after the main part of the surveying was finished.
The sunrise at right, however, was on the Saturday morning, and it seems like a nice place to start.
Snape Reserve is a Trust for Nature property of about 750 ha.
It backs onto the Little Desert National Park and contains a diverse range of different flora communities.
The task of caring for the precious remnants and revegetating the cleared agricultural areas is obviously a massive one, but one that seems to be in very good hands indeed. After three days there, I left feeling that the reserve is a credit to the volunteers who manage it.
There was an excellent turnout for the survey, with representation from Birds Australia and a variety of local groups, including both the Horsham and Dimboola BOCA branches and TFN volunteers.
The trees of the reserve host an enormous amount of mistletoe — more than can be really healthy for them, but it does provide good bird habitat and can be very beautiful in its own right.
Wonderful flora, but it's time for some birds pictures. Let's start with a Red-capped Robin.
The woodlands are alive with Jacky Winters and (to a lesser extent) Hooded Robins. Oddly, for it seems like perfect Red-capped Robin habitat, I saw only one.
Robins are always a delight to photograph. Apart from their considerable natural charm, they sit beautifully still for you; they fly to predictable perches; they show off first one profile, then the other (just in case you didn't like the first one); and they don't mind if you follow them around a bit. Jacky Winters are amongst the most photographer-friendly of them all (matched, at least in my experience, only by the Eastern Yellow, the White-breasted, and perhaps the Pale Yellow).
A terrible picture! The bird, though, is interesting. It's a Painted Honeyeater. Geoff and I found it, alone in a world of zooming, chattering New Hollands, inspecting clumps of mistletoe. It was obviously not a New Holland, nor anything else that either of us had seen before. Geoff put a name to it right away — which impressed me no end!
Let's make it look really bad by zooming in.
Note the white belly and throat (partly hidden) and the vaguely orange-coloured bill pointed up and to the right (looking at first more like a mistletoe leaf than part of the bird). Note the yellow in the wings and tail. In life, the yellow wing feathers were more obvious than this, and with its smart white underside, its a very handsome bird. Geoff and I would have happily swapped two or three of whatever teeth we had remaining to see another one. We keenly studied every stray New Holland that crossed our path from that time on, but without success.
The Southern Scrub-robin is generally uncommon and rather difficult to find: not at Snape Reserve! Nearly everyone saw them. I saw at least one on all three days without difficulty. The Shy Heathwren, on the other hand, only chose to bless a few of the lucky or more skilled ones amongst us. Still no tick next to the Shy Heathwren in my book, alas.
There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of Musk Lorikeets feeding on the stringybark blossom, with an equal number of their Purple-crowned relatives. With my camera setup, I get enormous zoom but pay for it with slow and cumbersome operation, so the way to get good shots of feeding lorikeets is to resign yourself to spending a whole day on the task, and rely on getting lucky if you stick at it for long enough. With so much else to see in just a few hours, I decided that chasing just two species was a bad idea, and moved on with only this poor shot to remember them by.
Given the large number of other birds around, raptors seem to be very scarce on the reserve. I think my count for the three days was representative: I saw two Brown Goshawks, a Collared Sparrowhawk, and a Little Eagle far away.
That's it: four raptors in three days.
Where were the Brown Falcons, the Nankeen Kestrels, the Black-shouldered Kites? Even kookaburras were hard to find. Perhaps the explanation lies in the apparent shortage of small mammals and reptiles: I didn't see a mammal smaller than a wallaby all weekend, and didn't spot any reptiles at all — yet there seemed to be no great shortage of insects. With all that grass seed about, you'd think that there would be mice everywhere.
But if the ground-feeding raptors have gone elsewhere to find mice and lizards, why were falcons so few and far between? There was certainly no shortage of parrots and honeyeaters for them to eat. Yes, others among us saw falcons, but very few of them.
Spotlighting for nocturnal raptors didn't turn too many up either.
But where skill and perseverance fail, there is always good old dumb luck to fall back on. Dawn and Geoff and I flushed this Southern Boobook from a roost very low down in a Callitris late on Saturday afternoon — and had quite a puzzle working out what it was, as none of us had seen the light-coloured inland form before. (My apologies for the standard of the shot: with owls, you take whatever camera angle you can get, and if it's against the light as this one is, you still feel lucky to have seen the bird at all. Despite having seen several much rarer birds, for me the Boobook was the highlight of the trip.)
There is only one permanent waterpoint on the reserve. It is quite unrepresentative of the rest of the area, but the obvious best place for a photographer in a hurry. I spent a couple of hours there around lunchtime on the Monday, and was rewarded with a delightful succession of visitors.
There is no cover worth speaking about, so I had to sit in plain view 10 or 12 metres from the favoured watering point and await events. This White-faced Honeyeater was the first drinker to arrive.
White-plumed Honeyeaters came in singles or in pairs from time to time. Three Brown-headed Honeyeaters — two adults and a juvenile — rolled up just as I was changing flash cards, so I missed my chance with them.
Curiously, in close to two hours at the dam, I saw not one New Holland Honeyeater bathing or drinking, though there were plenty to be seen flitting about the trees in the middle distance. This is interesting, as at home (where we get twice as much rainfall and standing water is common) the New Hollands are amongst the most active and frequent bathers of the lot. I was concentrating on photography, not observation, but I don't recall seeing any New Hollands hanging around nearby trying to decide if it was safe to approach with me there, and in any case, they tend to be as bold as brass. Perhaps it has to do with the quality of the water? Or maybe they don't like bathing in such an exposed location? A mystery.
Crested Pigeons arrived and left on foot, drinking from the waters edge instead of from the fallen timber all the smaller birds preferred, and not liking to be so close to me but eventually deciding I was probably harmless.
Not fantastic shots, alas, but the Diamond Firetails are full of charm, and responsible for me breaking my self-imposed rule for this page of one shot per species. My excuse is that I couldn't decide if I most liked the upright solitary bather soaking, or the freeze-frame action of the family affair.
Red-rumped Parrots are their own excuse. If the males are amongst the most beautiful of parrots ......
..... the females are sublime.
I don't think I will ever tire of taking Red-rumped Parrot pictures.
Tony Wilson