Cape Banks and Long Bay - Pelagic Excursion

Last year I was blessed with some seriously good winter storms, nothing better than a cold winter morning with a solid south easterly when you are out trying to get a photo of an albatross or two. This year has been very disappointing when it comes to albatross sightings, it seems I never really got the combination of weekend and strong onshore winds.


Back in the beginning of September, however, a single weekend seemed to be decent i.e. weather so rubbish that the birds would not expect any human being foolish enough to be standings exposed on the cliffs, so there was a chance those pelagic winter visitors would relax and drift close to shore hopefully getting inside Bigma range.

Cape Banks did not deliver any albatrosses this September weekend, but I managed to finally get decent views of a few Hutton's Shearwaters passing by, they were a first for me :-)

Conditions were pretty rough and I decided to retreat. Furthest out on the cliffs around Long Bay an abandoned military observation post gives good shelter when all other options are too extreme and with nothing else on I opted for a few hours out in the "shed".

The shearwaters were flying too far away from the coast to allow for identification, but quite a few terns came in literally flying straight above me and a nice surprise was a juvenile Pacific Gull hanging around. Earlier this year I saw my first ever Pacific Gull in Long Bay, few weeks before seeing hundreds of them down in Wilson's Promontory.

All good - after a day like that you feel proud to have been outside, just make sure to wash some of all that saltwater spray of the camera and it will all be fine :-)

Birding Rottnest Island

As usual, a Perth trip (nearly) always include a trip across the water out to Rottnest Island and in similar consistent fashion it never disappoint. Well to be absolutely honest, I would have been happy to finally bag a Rock Parrot, but following the usual logic it would be sad to deplete such a nice area and bring into question the need to visit it again. ;-)

I have seen Common Pheasant (top photo) in Australia before - at least 3 times - but every sighting have been brief and on Rottnest, this time I managed to get a photo which qualified for the blog. This introduced bird has, very much like the Mute Swan in Northam, only managed to establish a foothold in a few select places - all of them islands.

Another old Rottnest friend is the White-fronted Chat. Last time I managed to get a less than impressive photo of a WFT darting across the path, this time we were truly in for a treat with a little family of not less than 10 feeding at the salt lakes in the middle of the island.


The salt lakes are normally a fantastic bird spot, but this time - end of April - there was very little to see, apart from the White-fronted Chats we only managed to see a couple of other waders; Red-necked Avocet and Red-capped Plover above.

Guess there is a season for everything, no Banded Stilts at the salt lakes this time, but instead we were treated with a little Osprey family living in one of the gigantic nests placed on reefs just of the coast. Every year there are 2 to 4 Osprey families nesting around Rottnest, instead of starting from scratch they will reuse one of the up to 70 year old nest "towers" which through generations have grown to abnormal size. Those of you that know the size of an Osprey - 50 to 65cm - will be able to judge the magnitude of the construction in the photo above.


All good! Rottnest was firing on all cylinders. No new ticks, unless one of my tern-knowledgeable readers can create a bit of excitement by naming the tern in the picture below, I would not mind if someone told me that it was a Common Tern race hirundo? But if someone insist on it being a young-but-not-juvenile Antarctic Tern, then it would be very exciting! ;-) These were the bird, but I will return shortly with a underwater and probably a miscellaneous report.

Long Bay - Pacific Gull

I could start this blog post exactly like the previous, where I rattled on about how a short 10 minuets drive down along the coast can give you more new ticks than 4 days of hard(?) birding far far away from Sydney. Less than a week after our La Perouse trip, we decided to give Long Bay a go - Long Bay being even closer to home than La Perouse, surely there would be no ticking action going on, but I have come to like the walking in the area down there and there was a breeze from south east - the right direction, but to be honest nowhere near strong enough for a real pelagic excursion.

Soon after we had parked the Magna and started walking the very large gull in the first picture past us flying along the rocky shore and it looked like it was looking for somewhere to land! The Australian selection of gulls is very limited (if you do not count the six or so rare vagrants) there are only three in the club: The Silver, Kelp and Pacific Gulls. Silver is hard to avoid, Kelp is around if you look for it, but Pacific is hard to find around Sydney - it is much more common down south, but we had not seen it at Ben Boyd and here we were back home in Sydney with an enormous gull very much looking like a juvenile Pacific Gull cruising around in our backyard!


The gull had landed down on a hard-to-get-to rock platform, but the need for a confirmation picture gave us wings .. or rather enhanced crawling capabilities :-) As soon as we got a closer look, there was absolutely no doubt that we had indeed bagged the Pacific Gull, not bad for a Wednesday afternoon.

After a bit of celebration(?) we continued our walk out towards the usual sea bird lookouts at the cliff top. As expected the weather was not rough enough to push the passing shearwaters in towards the coast and into range of the Bigma - if you wait long enough you will always get a few reasonable pictures, but nothing compare to the amount of close vicinity action that happens on a good stormy winter day along the coast .. a few months and there will hopefully again be a bit of albatross action on the blog.

Great afternoon trip to Long Bay, very exciting once again seeing a new bird! I had already planned another Victoria trip where I would be (nearly) certain to see the Pacific Gull, but there is something special about being surprised and seeing birds where you did not expect to see them.
We had been out a few days earlier trying to get pictures of the Sooty Shearwater slightly further down along the coast. In these economically unstable times I have decided to save the price of an entirely new blog post by including a few pictures from that trip here in the end of the Long Bay endeavor. These are handheld, but of fair quality - considering the distance. This winter I should probably give my monopod one more chance - I seriously did not like using it last winter, but I guess it is a question of giving it a fair go and if it can give me a stop or two it could dramatically reduce noise in these sea bird pictures where I usually have to crop quite hard to get something usable.