wollongong

Wollongong, what a great name for a town eh, enough to make anyone from somewhere named as dully as Frome consider topping themselves.
Have had a Rather busy weekend, starting on saturday by taking te ferry from cronulla across to bundeena in the north east corner of the royal national park and walking across the NP to heathcote station, gettign badly lost in the rainforest thanks to a walking trail that looked like a wallaby track and vice versa, and a river with no obvious crossing point, still, i made it to heathcote in time for a train to wollongong. after arriving in wollongong i headed into town to do some shopping and somehow ended up inside the st.george illawarra dragons stadium watching their rugby league game against the cronulla sharks, unfortunately it properly pissed it down for most of the game, so it was quite a scrappy game in difficult conditions, but several cracking fights were very entertainig, one of whic resulted in the sin-binning of three players. great stuff
then today (sunday0 i had my second pelagic off wollongong. it was very similar to my last trip with only 2 new species, wedge tailed and huttons shearwaters but with 8 species of albatross and several solnaders petrels. also had awesoem views of humpback whales breaching alongisde the boat plus bottlenose and common dolphins.

Royal national Park

spent the day exploring the moors area in the north east of the Royal National Park, south of sydney. highlights were two of the three target birds for the area, southern emu-wren and tawny crowned honeyeater, though the lack of chestnut rumped hylacola was annoying. the emu-wrens were much harder to see than the mallee emu wrens at hattah thanks to the much denser vegetation, also a pant soilingly close encounter with a big off snake affected my fieldcraft somewhat (jumping several feet into the air and squealing like a girl), unsurprisingly the emu-wrens were not impressed with my stalking skills and had long since buggered off by the time i regained my composure.
The coastline of the national park is truly stunning with views from sydney down to wollongong. the sanbdstone cliffs had all sorts wierd patterns eroded into them and a group of humpback whales breaching spectaculalrly (albeit distantly) offshore just topped off the views nicely.
unfortunately the weather turned sour this afternoon, tipping down with rain and the wind really got up quite strong, hopefully it will turn nicer for my pelagic on sunday.

more pics

White winged chough- which together with the apostlebird a few posts ago
makes up the entire corcoracidae family, one of only 5 bird
families endemic to australia (or somethin along those lines)















Redthroat















Misteltoebird















Sturts Desert Pea

















Redback spider on a pumpkin i was trying to pick

















Brown treecreeper



















Working on the vineyard

a few more pix from broken hill and hattah

Regent Parrot

















Mulga Parrot

















Spotted Nightjar

Red rumped parrot

hattah kulkyne NP

mallee ringneck














grey backed butcherbird














apostlebird

i'm now back from my camping trip to hattah kulkyne NP, a massive patch of mallee scrub and lakes and stuff between mildura and melbourne. avian highlights were excellent views of mallee emu-wren and regent parrot and typically brief (i.e. shit) views of striated grasswren. other new birds were splendid fairy wren, gilberts whistler, crested bellbird, striped and yellow tufted honeyeaters. other more dubious highlights were being chased by a very stroppy emu with several cool stripey chicks, and turning the tables by chasing a kangaroo (dont ask why) and causing it to jump over a 7ft roo fence. camping was much less than comfortable in freezing overnight temperatures in a sleeping bag rated to +10degrees and on hard ground without a rollmat. that'll learn me not to travel light again.

apologies for really shit pics, the net cafe has no editing software at all, i cant even crop the pics!! and they have the cheek to call australia a civilised modern country, pah!
the fact that blogger doesnt seem t oallow me to post pics of rare birds (orange chat, mulga parrot, redthroat, regent parrot) doesnt help either.

broken hill

i'm now back from my a short trip to broken hill. it really is the arse end of beyond, 300km from any other settlement. the town itself was a bit of a dump with horrific scars from its mining heritage which created the wealth to build the town, one huge open cast mine splits the place in two. apparently the "line of lode" the metal seam that runs through it is the richest in the world for zinc, silver and another one that i cant remember.
as for the birds, i really had no idea where to look, i just knew that there were loads of rare desert goodies "within 150km of Broken Hill", that would be fun without a car. i decided that the best bet would be to hire a bike and try heading as far out of the town as i could physically manage. On the first day i rode 20km north east on the silver city highway to Stephens Creek, a river that had long dried up. this area was very productive with mulga parrot, redthroat, chestnut crowned babbler and pink cockatoo. cycling slowly back to town produced loads of chirruping wedgebill and several orange chat, really smart birds. also new for me were australasian pipit and brown songlark. riding back was really tough, the wind had picked up while i was birding stephens creek and i was heading straight back into it, along with several small sandstorms.
The next day (today) i couldnt go so far as i had a bus back to mildura (where i'm writing this from) in the early afternoon. i headed out towards the "living desert'" sculpture symposiom, 12km north west of broken hill. roughly halfway there i stopped at a site that i thought looked promising and was rewarded with a superb male crimson chat, rufous songlark, shy hylacola (heathwren) and a spotted nightjar roosting on the ground.
overall not a bad few days considering i had no real gen.
am catching the bus down to hattah kulkyne NP in a few hours to camp for a 3 nights and to try and see some of the rarer mallee specialists. unfortunately the bus doesnt arrive at hattah til 10:45pm and then its 5 km to the campsite, not sure what i'll do but i hope to work something out pretty soon, my first bit of "going bush" required methinks.

leaving mildura

apologies for not updating this for ages, havnt really had much to update it with.
i've mqanaged only one days birding since the last update, on sunday i looked around ranfurly lakes. the highlight was a large hirundine flock which contained my first fairy martins and a cracking trio of white backed swallows.
tommorrow morning i'm off to broken hill, in the new south wales outback for a few days, then down camping at hattah kulkyne NP, then back to the east coast for a wollongong pelagic and then its off to fiji for two weeks, its a hard life eh!

Vineyard work

i have started new work in a vineyard now, pruning the vines, which is quite easy work but obviously a little boring.
we get picked up at 6:30am which is bit naff when you work hard all day and drink hard all night, its pretty impressive to see the sun rising over the frosty outback on the daily commute though. the vineyard really is in the middle of nowhere, its an hours drive from mildura. plenty of wildlife around the site, have seen plenty of kangaroos and emus on the way to work. yesterday on the way back from the work, a lad from manchester who was riding his motorbike back had a full on collission with an emu that ran out in front of him, he was very lucky to get away with only a coupe, of ratehr savage grazes to his knees, the emu was not so lucky and was scrambling around on the side of the road, luckily a local farmer was driving behind our bus and had a rifle handy to finish it off, though his .243 was hardly the ideal weapon for such a dispatch.

i have mangaged to pick up my forst injury from native wildlife. some obnoxious little bastard of a mosquito has bitten me on the left elbow causing it to swell up to the size of a small zepplin, its impeding ym work slightly but hopefully will go down soon enough.

i've managed to get out doing a bit of birding around mildura in the evenings after work. Lake ranfurly has been the most productive site with white winged fairy wren, bluebonnet parrots, zebra finches, masses of caspian terns and plenty of ducks and waders.
other sites nearby have produced red capped and hooded robin, southern whiteface, apostlebird and brown treecreeper.

also apologies for all the shitty spam comments being left, i have now had to enable comment moderation to stop this. Does anyone know if is possible to delete existing commenst?

Pumpkin Picking, Exciting stuff

have spent the last few days picking pumpkins just over the border into New South Wales fro mMildura, now that may seem like a very dull job, most of the time it was, but the presence of Red backed spiders hiding underneath quite a few of the pumpkins was rather alarming, these spiders can kill a human quite easily with a single bite, not so boring after all
also managed to see Malle Ringneck ( a parrot) in the vineyards adjacent to the pumpkin fields whilst working, which took the trip list to 300, not bad for a month of not very intensive birding.

Mildura birding

finally got out to do some proper birding around mildura this arvo (as they say over here). knocked oof wrok early and spent some time looking around the murray river. flame robin, weebill, yellow billed spoonbill, diamond dove, white browed babbler, australian shoveller, hoary headed grebe, caspian tern and the star, a cracking crested shrike tit were all new birds for me.

Random fact of the day:

Some people may be able to rememebr some really naff adverts on talksport radio durin genglands last cricket tour of england for a place called Sunraysia, i think one of them went something like this, read by someone with a really camp austrlian voice

so if your coming ot australia, visit Sunraysia for a while,
and try our l0vely prune juice, its sure to make you smile (or give you the shits for 3 days)

well, Sunraysia is the district i'm in now, if you can remeber the advetrs that would be quite funny but if you never heard them you probably think i'm utterly bonkers, (if you didnt already that is)

joe

Theres an Englishman, a german, a finn and and irishman

No, not the start of a really shit joke i stole off the internet, but the mix we have at the hostel i'm staying at. All a good bunch but communication is obviously quite difficult. The german, the finn and the irishman all speak very good english and talk alot, my lack of any grasp of the language leaves me feeeling quite left out. The irishman is from limerick

There once was a young man from limerick
who was a bit of a prick
he spoke utter tripe
smoked hash through a pipe
and was really rather thick


see what i did there, he's from limerick, and i made a limerick about him, clever eh! sorry
i'm now in the rather isolated town of mildura, just in the state of victoria on the edge of the murray river. Started some vineyard work today, it was the slightly odd job of cutting off sticks from the vines to be planted and earning 7cents per stick, on to hourly pay tomorrow so should be better. not had time for any birding so far, but managed to see dusky woodswallow, spiny cheeked honeyeater, black shouldered kite and yellow rosella whilst working, which probably didnt help my 'sticks per hour' rate.
Mildura is a bit of a strange place, without wanting to slag it off too much after being here for only a day, it seems like one of those places where everybody knows everbody, nobody trusts anybody and "have i met you before, maybe at a family reunoin" is likely to be the best chat up line in a club.
hopefully i'll be getting down to Hattah Kuklkyne NP soon for some of the mallee specialities
joe

Biting the bullet

i did something rather rash today. i woke up in the morning and thought it would be nice to go to fiji. so i've booked flights for the first two weeks of september. hopefully as well as doing the main island of viti levu i'll be able to get across to the smaller islands of kadavu and taveuni for the endemics.
Tommorrow morning i catch a 15hour bus ride to mildura for a months worth of vineyard work (to pay for the fiji trip), then i'm heading back to wollonong for another pelagic on the 27th august before flying out to fiji two days afterwards. i'm not sure what internet access will be avaiable in mildura so dont be surprised if the blog is not updated for a while.

joe

p.s, if anyone reading this knows anything about birding near mildura of fiji please e-mail me at joe_cockram@hotmail.com

cheers

Barren Grounds

I'm back in Sydney yet again for a short while after a good few days down in Wollongong.
On the pelagic i met acouple of english birders who offered to take me to Barren Grounds reserve. As is the usual for Australia in July it pissed it down all day which didnt help birding. However the Eastern Bristlebirds which are usually incredibly secretive were all over the place feeding on the paths. Beautiful Firetial was also seen well, as well as a Male superb Lyrebird. After Barren Grounds we went to Boomaderry Creek where we saw Rock Warbler and Yellow Tufted Honeyeater.

Eastern Bristlebird

Pelagic pics

Some pics from the Wollongong Pelagic the other day:

Black Browed Albatross
Solanders Petrel
Wandering Albatross

Humpback Whale and Black browed Albatross

Campbell Albatross

Wollongong Pelagic

Today was the day i had been waiting for for ages. My last pelagic was almost 11 months ago off the isles of scilly. Anyone who has done pelagics will know how addictive they are, and know that 11 moths is a long time to go without.
as i was down to the harbour i saw a car embedded in a lampost with the engine smoking and wedged nicely between 2 palm trees on a mini roundabout, engine running and lights on, it had obviously only just crashed. i ran towards the car and could see what looked like someone slumped over the steering wheel, shit, i had 5 minutes to get to the boat and i would have to peform first aid and call the emergency services all because some pillock couldnt be arsed to take the long route AROUND the roundabout, i would surely miss the boat, arses. i got up to the windowof the car and a bloke lifted his head up from sending a text message and asked if i had any cigarettes, thank god for that, he was alrite, he told me not to tell anyone cos he wanted to get the car out of the way before the rossers found out. relieved, i ran on down to the boat.

with that minor drama out of the way i boarded the boat full of anticipation, i was not to be dissapointed, within minutes of leaving the harbour i had seen yellow nosed and black browed albatrosses, along with fluttering and short tailed shearwater (which i rather embarrasingly called as a Sooty) and pacific gull.
By the time we arrived back at the harbour 9 hours later i had seen 18 lifers including 7 albatrosses: Yellow nosed, black browed, shy, campbell, wandering, antipodean and white capped. Also Nothern and Southern Giant Petrel, Solanders petrel, fairy prion, brown skua and cape petrel. Also seen were 2 Humpback whales, a probable minke whale, a pod of common dolphin and a couple of australian fur seal.
OK, it wasnt anything special as wollongong pelagics go, with no rares for the locals but it was great to be surrounded by such awesome seabirds and mammals.
Another important feature of the trip was the ringing of the seabirds. It was pretty special to such gargantuan birds as Wanderign alberts and Giant Petrels in the hand, check out SOSSA'S website for more details: www.sossa-international.org

Off to barren grounds reserve tommorrow, then back to sydney and heading off to mildura for a spot of vineyard work fairly soon.

You can take the birder out of England...

but you can't take england out of the birder.

Today the weather was bloody terrible (the wettest July in Sydney for 5 years) so i decided on a rather lame day looking around the citys Centenniel Gardens. On arriving, a playing field was flodded and was covered in birds, so what did i do, admire the red rumped parrots, galahs, kookaburras and sacred ibis, no, i thouroughly checked the starling flock, despite the fact that "checking the starling flock for vagrants in winter" is listed no.7 in the book "101 ways to waste time in Australia", available from your local book store or Tescos. I did manage to pick up 4 new birds for the trip list but they are all so shamefully common i wont even list them. Then as i flopped in front of the fire to dry my soaking carcass, i turned on the telly and the news was reporting record heatwaves in Western Europe, someone up there really is "tekkin' piss", as they say in Yorkshire.
As an aside, congratulations to my new favourite aussie Justin Langer for beating several types of shit out of Surrey Cricket Club for Somerset http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/cricket/counties/5197406.stm

Somerset La La La

pictures added

i've added a load of pictures on now i have decent internet access. theyre chucked in a load of random places so be sure to look through the whol blog to see them all

old singapore pics

Somerset MRT station in central Singapore

a few more pix from singapore cos the computers being gay and not letting me add them to the original posts:


White rumped Shama juv.

Oriental Pied Hornbill

older pics from kakadu and Pine Creek

Intermediate Egret
Bar Breasted Honeyeater
White bellied Sea-eagle
Rather large esturaine croc


Male and female Hooded Parrot

Final day in Blue Mountains

Me with the apparently famous "Three Sisters" rock formation

Am back in sydney with relatives now after leaving the blue mountains. I had been fairly disappointed as i had only seen 2 of the 5 target species for the area, rock warbler and superb lyrebird. i had a few hours to kill before getting the train so braved the rain for one final walk between katoomba falls and echo point. it ha djust got past the cable car station and practically bumped into a pilotbird feeding on the path just in front of me. it showed down to about 2 metres before notincing i was there and disappearing into the woods. i was pretty chuffed, i really hadnt expected to see pilotbird that day. i continued walking back to echo point and soon bumped into a honeyeater wave ( a flock of moxed honeyeater species moving through the forest from one flowering tree to another) i checked through them thoroughly, eastern spinebill, new holland, white naped, yellow faced and lewins honeyeater, and finally, a Crescent Honeyeater, on a branch right in front of me, then 3 more. In the space of 5 minutes my stay in the blue mountians had gone from a reasonable trip to a true success, i felt like punching the air but resisted, until the sun broke through and a blast of indiana jones theme music from the Scenic World Skway echoed down the valley and i couldnt help myself, a group of japanese tourists hurried away looking rather worried.
A rock warbler, being blinded by my camera flash, that'll learn it to sit still