Dear all
What a lovely day at the bird roost!! Not only did we have lots of birds (1402) but also lots of people for the Bribie Island Nature Festival – over 30 people looked through my scope while getting excited about flocks of godwits, knots and plovers. It was a wonderful opportunity to combine education with bird watching and hopefully some will go away inspired with a better understanding and appreciation of these incredible birds. May Brittan and other volunteers were doing a great job with leaflets and spare fieldglasses. Thank you.
And there were some exciting birds here this morning. A Great Knot with a yellow over black leg flag banded in Kamchatka Peninisula, Russia, was among the more than 1000 godwits and 120 knots crowded onto the roost. It was a very high tide (2.5m), the first day high tide for a long time and pushed the shorebirds off the Passage roosts and also Toorbul roost. It just shows how important the Kakadu Beach roost is for our shorebirds at these big tides. We welcomed back AKE, a bar-tailed godwit that has been coming since about 2013. Unfortunately QWSG doesn’t have precise dates for birds banded before then but I have recorded her for over 11 years which means she has flown a staggering 242,000 km in migration since she was banded (and we are not sure when or how old she was when banded!).
There was also the welcome sight of six Red Knots, one of our flagship endangered species. A Black-tailed Godwit was also spotted among an incoming flock of Bar-tails and this is first record for some time. Three Pacific Golden Plovers were on the roost (they are common residents at the Pacific Harbour marina park but rare at KBBR). There were also three Eurasian Whimbrels (again a high number for Kakadu Beach). We often have a single bird but three is good. I think the Red-capped Plover pair are nesting; one spent a long time sitting quietly in the same patch of sand which in itself is unusual for our lively Red-caps.
However, the Beach Stone-curlews who laid an egg last Monday had lost it by Wednesday and were parading sadly and noisily up and down the beach, perhaps looking for a new nest site. It may have been a crow that took the egg, but BSC are not above stealing oystercatcher eggs themselves!!
It’s a great time to watch out for new species turning up, attached to the migrating flocks winging their way south. Happy bird watching.
Species (23)
Australian Pelican 8
Australian Tern 2
Australian White Ibis 2
Bar-tailed Godwit (1062)
Beach Stone-curlew (2)
Black-tailed Godwit (1)
Buff-banded Rail (3)
Caspian Tern (2)
Chestnut Teal (2)
Eurasian Whimbrel (3)
Far Eastern Curlew (106)
Great Knot (120)
Great Crested Tern (16)
Grey-tailed Tattler (1)
Little Pied Cormorant (1)
Masked Lapwing (4)
Pacific Golden Plover (3)
Pied Cormorant (2)
Pied Oystercatcher (4)
Pied Stilt (30)
Red Knot (6)
Red-capped Plover (1)
Silver Gull (24)
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