Nurragingy Reserve (21st May '06)

Well, work has been a bit frantic these last few weeks so I've been completely out of touch with you all. My apologies. I have managed to get out for a couple of trips though. One of these was to Nurragingy reserve which is an area of dry sclerophyll forest in the western suburbs of Sydney at Doonside. Its basically just a large picnic area full of noisy locals but is one of the few areas of dry forest in the region and Eastern Creek runs through it meaning its a bit of a corridor for any birds travelling through.

Picnic areas and Eastern Creek - mmm lovely

I tried to get into the corners of the reserve away from the punters but you can't really escape them too well. As far as the birds went, there was just an infinite swarm of noisy miners. After an hour or so of seeing nothing else, save the odd magpie-lark and currawong, I was getting a bit annoyed. You can imagine my joy, therefore, when a Collared Sparrowhawk # 243 slammed into the flock and killed one of them! That got the little blighters excited I can tell you. And despite the intense alarm calls and carry on, the sparrowhawk just sat there for ages just rubbing it in I think. He was a juvenile bird and I'm not going to get a better view than that one. Unfortunately all the twigs in the way removed the photo opportunity.

Its getting dark early now we're getting into winter so there wasn't a lot of time before I had to leave. Just before I did though I found a magic tree which I wish I'd found before. There were loads of different species in there and in the fading light I picked the noisy miners (obviously), white-naped, white-plumed and yellow-faced honeyeaters, grey fantails, red wattlebird, striated pardalote and varied sitellas. A couple of these I've only seen once before so that was nice. There were other little things in there too but they were too small and brown to pick! A pair of chestnut teal and a beautiful pair of eastern rosellas on the way back to the car rounded things off. Next time I'll start with this corner of the park. They were locking the gate in front of me when I got to the exit but luckily they saw common sense and let me out which was nice.

Kookaburra - the only thing that reliably sits still long enough to photograph!

Target Bird: Double-bar Finch (Negative)
Catch the Pigeon: Spotted trutle-dove
Roadkill strike assessment: Excited little children (High)