Lamington National Park - Morning Bird Tour at O'Reilly's

Early morning just after sunrise O'Reilly's arranges a ca. 1 hour bird tour around the estate. It has become a many year old tradition to take guest around meeting some of the feathered inhabitants of the area and as always with animals it simply has to be on every single day to nurture the relationship that has been established between guides and birds. The tour is simply a must for all visitors, it is amazing to see how a few raisins, a bit of cheese(?..!) and years of patience have loosened the usual apprehension birds have towards us humans.

Before the tour really began, we could celebrate the first highlight of the day - a female Regent Bowerbird decided to perch itself in an exceptional photogenic position right outside the O'Reilly's reception - That was a new one for me :-)

After a quick walk around the grassy areas close to the complex and a visit to a Satin Bowerbird bower we dived into the rain forest where a little army of birds were ready to welcome us. I have seen Wonga Pigeon being very undisturbed by the presence of humans before, but Eastern Whipbird is notoriously difficult to get good photos of and here it was jumping around few meters from our feet - "Mister Whippy" was apparently in a great morning mood :-)


As always it is great value being taken around by one of the locals, we were taught how to spot "hidden" hanging bird nests and we saw the hollow tree where the Nightjar was spotted last time - unfortunately it looked like the Nightjar had left the spot - and a flood of tree and plant related knowledge was flowing freely after a couple of inquisitive horticultural questions were asked by a certain tree loving WA gentleman that had joined the birding excursion.


Great stuff and a fantastic opportunity of getting some excellent close-ups of some great birds. Anticipating the darkness of the early morning rain forest I had luckily chosen the fast macro (Sigma 150mm f/2.8) and could continue shooting it quite wide open and with assistance from the on-board flash, as I had done up in far north Queensland. In manual mode with an aperture of f/4.0 and a shutter speed of 1/160s I could control exposure by flash output compensation alone.


Great stuff! I am pretty happy about some of the Eastern Yellow Robin shots - it was a particular photogenic participant. The Yellow-throated Scrubwren is a bird that I do not see everyday, so nice with a close encounter. A Lewin's Honeyeater came along for the shenanigans, but there was no doubt that it was the bowerbirds that were stars of the morning - Great to finally see a Regent Bowerbird - we only saw females during the morning walk, but we managed to spot a male later during the day down at our "rain forest"-terrace - and a male Satin Bowerbird is always a treat.

Lane Cove Owl Hunting and Maitland Bay Snorkeling

If there has ever been a misrepresenting title it is probably the one above :-) After sending my dad back to Denmark, little G. and yours truly teamed up with the Amoores for what we expected to be a bit of Maitland Bay snorkeling bonanza.

Before getting into the tight tight speedoes and the rest of the underwater gear, we hoped for a little rendezvous with a Powerful Owl supposedly residing in Lane Cove National Park. With some telephonic help and a bit of luck we managed to find the roosting spot but unfortunately the owl had decided to leave. Nevertheless I was quite satisfied with the stopover, since I managed to see and “digitalize” an Yellow-throated Scrubwren at the creek and also got reasonable pictures of a water dragon and a Huntsman spider that Adelle liked so much that she invited it to travel along on our journey. The YTS was new to me :-)

Arriving at Maitland Bay we soon realized that our pitfall with the owl was matched with an “extreme fire danger”-sign announcing that good old Maitland Bay was well and truly of limit – the walk down to the bay through the bush was simply considered to dangerous!

After a bit of deliberation and some advice from the local National Park volunteer we decided that it was to much of a drive to not get the speedoes wet, so we drove down the hill to Putty Beach for a bit of beach and snorkeling. The beach was fantastic and the snorkeling was medium, but all in all orders of magnitude better than just driving home.

Leaving the beach we headed for Killcare for a bit of lunching and to stimulate a bit of dreaming by examining some Central Coast real estate. Fantastic end of town up there! Not exactly cheap, but still fair enough that you pay for a location with ocean views and national park in the backyard.

While walking around J. "hawk-eye" Amoore noticed that a flock of Rainbow Lorikeets in a distant tree was accompanied by a "different" type of parrot .. a quick investigation involving nearly a hundred shots with the Bigma and I could once again find the pen and tick a new bird, the Musk Lorikeet.

Great way to spend a Saturday and it might be worth looking at prices in postcode 2257 ;-)