Mikael and I signed up for another free event from the City of Gold Coast and ended up in one of my favorite places in our hometown: Coombabah, but this time trying to spot and hear birds rather than koalas.
Mikael brought his camera to this bird and photography walk of course. I only brought my binoculars and phone. Mikaels camera lens was definitely not the right one for bird photography, so we focused on just listening to them or looking at them through my binoculars.
The guide, Todd, from the City of Gold Coast was amazing, so enthusiastic and told us what birds he could hear constantly. There were so many different ones!
I could identify a few. Easy with the laugh of a kookaburra. Or the singing of the magpies, chattering of the rainbow lorikeets or the murmurs of the crows. I can even identify other birds which we didn’t see this time, but after living here for a while, you learn what makes what noise.
High up in the sky there were several raptors, both White-Throated Needletail and Whistling Kites. One of them, can’t remember which on, is the fastest bird going in a horizontal line and not downward getting help from gravity. Pretty cool.
There was this young boy with us who had such a keen eye and spotted so many birds, especially Forest Kingfishers. I haven’t ever seen one, but this day, I saw four. As someone who doesn’t know birds, I can say that it looks like a smaller version of a kookaburra (since the kookaburra also is a type of kingfisher, although the largest). In this picture to the right, there are two, can you spot them?
Apparently, the kookaburra was introduced in WA by humans and they are now considered pests over there. First of all, why would humans do that? Second, imagine hearing the laugh of a kookaburra and not have happy thoughts regarding it?
Since we were walking around in Coombabah, a new trail though which we hadn’t walked before: Melaleuca Track, where there were tons of natural habitats for birds, we saw other wildlife as well. Two koalas and a few kangaroos, honestly I think only five.
This was pretty macabre. I saw something hanging seemingly in the air when we were at the very back of the group. I looked closer and saw the tail feathers. It was a poor bird, stuck in a spider web. How is that even possible? How strong are the spider webs here? What kind of spider eats birds?! Too many questions.
We walked up to the group, someone told the Conservation Officer who led the small exhibition and we all turned back to have a look again as he, in all of his career, never had seen anything like this. He had seen birds get caught but managed to fly away, he had even helped a bird. But never a dead one. This poor guy was a Leaden Flycatcher apparently.
Bemm 