Long Reef - Wandering Tattler Twitch

Earlier in the year I was out twitching the Wandering Tattler at Long Reef - as was the rest of Sydney. Long Reef is prime wader and Mark Young habitat, if you have not yet seen Mark's blog about the life around Long Reef, then press here or follow the link in the "My Blog List" to the right.

I had once again teamed up with Jarrod, who is normally an excellent early starter, but this Saturday we managed to truly mess up when we decided to begin our journey midday - making your way to the northern beaches through Sydney traffic a Sunday midday is less fun than filing your tax return and it takes longer time!

Well, after some very slow driving we finally arrived and eagerly pushed up the hill to overlook the reef. For some reason it felt like the entire world had decided to make this day a struggle for us - in reality all our troubles were probably self-inflicted due to exceptional bad planning - not only was it high tide and the reef flooded, just as we reached the top of the hill it started raining cats and dogs! In combination with the howling winds from the east, long reef did in no way look like a place to to spend a Sunday afternoon and attempting to find a dark Wandering Tattler in these conditions seemed a little foolish.

Somehow we had to justify a nearly 3 hours drive through Sydney traffic and we went down to inspect the tiny area of the reef that was still accessible. A few common birds where scattered around on the sand and rocks, but after a quick inspection we got alerted to the presence of a few exciting blue creatures caught in the shallow waters surrounding the reef.

A first for me was the incredible beautiful Glaucus atlanticus, aka blue sea slug. Not a large creature, but one of the prettiest water living characters I have seen during my time in Australia.

We saw quite a good number of these small blue gems of the ocean and a fearless Jarrod even assisted a couple of the stranded ones in making their way back to deeper water. Indeed us humans should do what we can to help this blue nudibranch, since its main food source is Blue Bottle, Physalia utriculus, and blue button, Porpita porpita - see the photos below. Both of these blue stingers are common around Sydney and the sting of the blue bottle in particular is an unpleasant experience that many Sydneysiders will have to endure when swimming in the sea on summer days with a easterly blowing. When the Glaucus atlanticus eats its victims it is capably of storing the most poisonous parts of its food and up concentrate the venom in the very tip of its "fingers". The means that the Glaucus atlanticus can deliver an even more vicious sting than the stingers it feeds on .. I am not sure Jarrod knew that when he volunteered to model in the photo above :-D


Feeling our luck changing after the success with the Glaucus atlanticus we once again started considering if there was indeed a chance of seeing the Wandering Tattler – the reason we drove to Long Reef in the first place. If the bird was still at the reef it would clearly have searched refuge at the still exposed rocky section now separated from the mainland by a ca. 100 meters flooded area … well that was there the bird was, then that was where we had to go to see it!

Luck follows the crazy – Danish saying “held følger de tossede” – Arriving at the rocky outcrop there was at first nothing indicating that we would be able to see or even less likely get decent pictures of the Wandering Tattler, weather had worsened, it had started raining again, that does not matter much when you are soaking wet up till above your knees, but the exposed reef was also significantly more windy than it had been ashore and I had nearly given up, when a tattler looking bird suddently took off from a sheltered part of the reef where we would have had no chance to see it if I had decided to stay.


It looped up and around the southern end of the reef and for a couple of seconds it looked like it was aiming at landing at our feet, just towards the end of its approach it seemed to suddenly realize that a couple of humans had entered its habitat and it broke off the approach and landed on a rock few meters away – There was our Wandering Tattler slightly confused a few meters in front of us, “wandering” up and down the rock as a model on the red carpet – Luck did indeed follow the ones with wet feet this Sunday afternoon at Long Reef.

All good, we got much more out of this rainy Sunday afternoon than we deserved and a new bird significantly adds to the joy of driving home through Sunday afternoon Sydney traffic.

Botany Bay National Park - Quails, Spider Wasp and Red Knot Twitching

One of the spots around Sydney that I return to over and over again is Botany Bay National Park – the southern part between Boat Harbour and Kurnell in particular. Earlier in the year I managed to get down there a couple of weekends in a row, firstly because I truly enjoy the walk along the coast and find the area down there slightly more exotic and less crowded than the coastal scrub around Coogee. If that was not enough, then with the presence of a Red Knot at Boat Harbour I was easily convinced.


I saw my first Brown Quail in Botany Bay National Park, and once again I had the joy of getting up close and friendly with a few BQs. You need luck to get in close, since you often do not realize the presence of these small fluff balls until they break cover in front of you and take off with the sound, and speed, of a gun salute .. leaving you behind wondering which type of quail you had just missed seeing.


On the way out from Boat harbour, I had seen something take off in front of me when I was close to the lighthouse, so on my way back I slowed down and took a careful look down the path – there was a little Brown Quail family pottering around on the path slowly making their way towards me. How easy was that, I hid behind a bend and even had time to change lens back to the Bigma (I had been using the macro for the photos of the Jewel Spider above). As they approached I could stand still and get excellent close-ups without moving, only as I tried to engage the flash it dawned on the quails that they were not alone, and they left the path and disappeared into the scrub.


A first for me during these Botany Bay trips was one of the fiercest battles I have ever seen in nature. I have heard about how spider wasps, Pompilidae, attack spiders and lay their egg inside them, but seeing it in reality was something that I never expected to witness. On one hand it is a terribly vicious way for the spider to die, on the other hand, it can be argued that the spider does not exactly run an insect friendly business and that it is only fair the spider wasp fights back taking out a few of the otherwise superior predators living off its defenseless relatives.



Another first was the sighting of a Red Knot. I had Jarrod along for the Knot spotting - with waders in non-breeding plumage you can always use an extra pair of eyes. It ended up being as difficult as expected and at some stage we were actually a bit afraid that we would not manage to locate this visitor to the reef. Similar to a “Where's Wally” puzzle, we had beehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifn looking for the usual red-and-white shirt and the distinct facial features of mister Red Knot, just to realize that colors were all wrong – the bird was indeed sporting the most boringly possible non-breading outfit ever seen, and the sneaky bird had decided to take a position with its beak hidden underneath a wing, just to make the game even more challenging.

Well, we got our bird in the end, it is actually quite nice when it takes a bit of effort and the additional quail and spider wasp action were nice bonuses – not to mention that I managed to get out and about in yet another weekend.

Christmas in Denmark - A Snap Freeze Experience

As always I had my usual summer escape to the cold end of Europa over Christmas - hereby once again highlighting the severe delay this very blog suffers from. In Denmark we statistically get ca. one white Christmas per 10 years i.e. the ground actually being snow covered on the 24th of December. A usual hobby of ours is to follow the various meteorologists publishing the probability of getting a white Christmas all the way through December - 2010 was different, very early on the bookmakers could stop taking bids, everyone knew it was going to be a very very cold white 2010 X-mas.


Danish winters teach you some good lessons in life, a couple worth highlighting here are: Eat well - it helps keeping you cozy and warm, and the other one is to get your lazy carcass outside every time there is just a hint of sunshine, you never know when the sun will be shining again. I have had heaps of joy following both of these rules of life! ;-)


As hinted above, this years winter was indeed something special. A delta T of -50 hits hard when you have slowly started adapting to the Australian temperature of life. A day after having been exposed to a leisurely 35°C in Sydney, I found myself in a very different habitat sporting a temperatures down to -17°C, I managed to capture the thermometer in the car in previously unseen territory of -15°C, you will have to trust me on the additional 2 degrees of frost.



A cold crisp Danish winter day is actually surprisingly good for a solid walk, as long as you keep yourself moving and dress wisely it is pure joy. The wise choice of cloth should include a "system" that keeps your fingers warm and still allow you to press that trigger ... I need to upgrade my equipment in that regard, holding 3 kilo of ice cold metal will make your fingers numb instantly when the mercury is in the minus two digits range.


I managed to squeeze in a bit of ice birding during a visit to a historically early frozen Limfjorden - normally this stretch of inland water in the north of Jutland does rarely freeze solid and of the few times this have happened before in my lifetime, I do not recall it ever happening this early in the year.


Birding during such conditions you have to be careful not to stress the birds, the last thing you want to happen is the birds having to burn precious energy fleeing their position because you pushed in to close trying to get a better shot. They are already stressed by suddenly having lost their natural defense against the usual 4 legged predators - foxes in particular - having access to their now landlocked roosting areas away from the coast.


A snow dressed Danish winter landscape, with high blue sky and crisp air is a pretty beautiful sight - quite lucky, since resent events means that I will probably soon have to spend a bit more time under such conditions.

Royal National Park

Things have been incredible busy around here during the last few months and once again I have have had a hard time balancing the act of getting out there exploring and the task of getting it all written down and documented. Hopefully this blog post will be the first of a quick series of postings that will bring me nearly up to date ;-) One can only hope.

Some time back I did a few walks with the Amoores in the Royal National Park, here is a little sum up of the highlights. The Australian summer do not invite for big excursions into the wilderness – you simply cannot carry the water needed for big walks, and relying on picking water up along the way is risky business – those small creeks have a nasty tendency of going dry when exposed to hot Australian summer weather.


A national park pass is a great idea, particular if you are doing short one day trips out of Sydney, since all of the parks around the metropolitan area is covered by the little sticker – in particular The Royal National Park down south of Sydney, aka “The Royal”.

The coastal national parks close to Sydney all delivers a great combination of the raw power of the sea mixed with spectacular sandstone cliffs, windblown heath and pockets of bushland. The mix in landscape ensures suitable habitats for a broad variety of wildlife. The Royal National Park is the biggest and arguably the most impressive of them all - not much beats a wander along the roaring sea, seeing how the waves pounds the sandstone cliffs, while White-bellied Sea-Eagles soars above :-)

These trips to the Royal National Park were indeed more for the joy of getting out rather than us targeting specific birds or other wildlife and as always, when you get out of your hobbit hole things starts happening around you and it is not necessarily what you expected to find.

The coastal heath delivered the usual gang of birds. You seriously have to admire how the New Holland Honeyeaters have conquered every single stretch of scrubby coastal heath on the NSW east coast, so much indeed that I have finally stopped taking those NHH photo, where a daring individual sits high, exposed above the scrub, taking looks at those camera slinging travelers passing through his windblown habitat. Instead I concentrated on the fantastic explosion of color, that was added to the otherwise dull scrubby green heath by a larger than normal presence of wildflowers.

I have tried to avoid it for years when it comes to wildflowers, but as with the birds and the other stuff I take photos of it all becomes more interesting when you start naming it. Pretty photos are all good, but if you can add names, then you also get the stories and the insight. So here we go, with great help from the all knowing internet I am willing to risk it and name the wonderfully red and white colored beauty above as Native Fuschia or Fuschia Heath, Epacris longiflora. Easy - even with next to no Latin skills it makes sense to name these elongated flowers "longiflora" i.e. long flowers.
The Rush Fringe Lily, Thysanotus juncifolius, below was actually the reason why I started looking for wildflower names - it is a stunningly beautiful flower and I simply felt that I needed to put the effort in to at least name this little gem. Next time I promise that I will bring the macro lens for some more appropriate close ups. The flower only last one day, but there are probably a couple of neighbors slightly out of sync, if you need more than 24 hours to return.


The strange looking "flower" below is from the Drumsticks & Conesticks family, Proteaceae. Spending some time online I have reached the conclusion that this one is the Narrow-leaf Drumsticks, Isopogon anethifolius.


A tip from a guide book steered us up along a little fresh water creek, through some scrubby bush and suddenly we were at our own private little waterhole, with waterfall, shade and some very confident and photogenic Water Dragons, Physignathus lesueurii.


The level of confidence should be pretty clear from the photo below - if food is on the other side and the way has been blocked by a shoe I will just have to climb the shoe .. and the fact that the shoe was well and truly attached to the leg of a human, that did not try to sit particular still, was of less concern :-) Not even the pregnant member of our little bushwalking gang showed that much lust for food.

A final treat, was the spotting of yet another wildlife species lured in by the power of food. While sitting eating on the sloping rocks bordering the waterhole tiny amounts of food must have dropped into the water, because suddenly a crayfish, Euastacus, emerged from the deep, searching for a meal. It was so eager indeed that strategic placement of crumbs in hard to reach places, nearly lured it out of the water.

Great stuff, once again the Royal delivered! These trips are very much a testimony to the fact that if you get out, you might not always see what you expect, but you will see something exciting.