Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Powerful Owl Action in the Capertee with The Yiing

With an absolute frantic push Thursday evening, a camping trip was arranged in less than 5 minutes. Yiing had invested some of his hard(?) earned $$$ in a tent and the Magna was more or less still packed from my last trip - I told you in a previous post that winter laziness had hit me hard! - how convenient :-)
Did the good old full-speed-out-of-Sydney-Friday-after-work routine only deviating from the usual procedure by a quick pick-up stop around Canonland where a very well packed Yiing had changed from his "I earn +200 kilo dollars a year"-suit to something much more colorful and camping like.

It was windy and it was cold, but boy did the Capertee deliver this time! :-)
One of the amazing things about camping in Australia during winter is the possibility of exploring the darkness - lots of Australian wildlife is only active during the safety of the night - and that was why we headed into the darkness armed with spotlights and Yiing's bird-call knowledge as soon as the tents were pitched.
We had little luck at first, but when we returned to the campsite a, what we believe to be, powerful owl was sitting in a tree approximately 20 meters away from our tents overlooking the camp ground - decent start to the weekend ;-)

Saturday ended up producing some proper tramping - did a good long walk into the deep end of the valley and ended up being on our legs most of the day - you do not freeze when you move :-)

Yiing is apparently a quite keen BW, so I did what I could to help him by taking a few pictures. You are very welcome to follow the link to my Picasa album further down. There was a few feathery species I do not recall having seen before, such as:

Speckeled Warbler, Turquoise Parrot, a few Robins; scarlet, flame and hooded.

Also I will need to take a closer look at the Song- and Bushlarks; I think there was two types seen, but those guys are hard to distinguish - hopefully I will have decent pictures of both, and finally Yiing will try to listen to a few owl-calls on the internet and let me know what the final verdict is on the campsite owl.
Any of you guys have the "Field Guide to Australian Birdsong"?
Update: After having visited "The Owl pages" http://www.owlpages.com/sounds.php there is no doubt left, It was indeed a Powerful Owl we heard and saw :-)

Yiing's tent magically grew in size during the weekend? It was such a nifty little package when he jumped into the car Friday evening, but by Sunday morning I took all his engineering skills to get that fat bastard down into that tiny little bag :-)
Capertee Valley with The Yiing

1 comment:

Jarrod said...

Drat I missed it and it sounds like you saw some great birds.