Sunshine Coast Birds

Birding and other wildlife experiences from the Sunshine Coast and elsewhere in Australia - and from overseas - with scribblings about travel, environmental issues, kayaking, hiking and camping.

Tuesday 24 April 2018

Powerful Owl, Musk Lorikeet about Sunshine Coast & Bribie Island

Powerful Owl male (L) female (R)

A pair of Powerful Owls has turned up at Beerwah on the Sunshine Coast. The agitated behaviour of both birds indicates they have begun nesting. The owls are in a reserve of open forest with a dense understory along Upper Coochin Creek. Thanks to my Facebook friend Chow Chilla, who discovered the birds and asked that the site remain under wraps, and to Matt Wright for helping me get on top of this pair. The birds were calling frequently in the area in recent days. One was seen to fly over houses after sunset, suggesting they may be feeding in suburbia as well as in the fragmented forest patches about Beerwah.

Powerful Owl male
Powerful Owl is a rare bird in the Sunshine Coast region. I've heard or seen them several times in the Conondale and Jimna ranges – at Charlie Moreland Park, Booloumba Creek and Peach Trees camping ground, among other places – but sparingly over many years. Friends have recorded them several times in their garden at Buderim and there is supposedly a territory near Gympie. Barry Traill last week had one calling in his garden at Maleny. Other locals reported Powerful Owls recently in the Blackall Range foothills between Maleny and Landsborough. Another Powerful Owl was taken into care recently after being hit by a motor vehicle in Moffat Beach.

POSTSCRIPT: 9/5/2018
A Powerful Owl was found road-killed last weekend on Steve Irwin Way, just 1 km from the roosting site. I checked out the site today and there was no sign of any owls, confirming fears that the dead bird was one of this pair, with the survivor probably having left the area.
POSTSCRIPT: 20/5/2018
Local residents have heard a single bird calling at the site, suggesting that the survivor is the female and sitting on eggs in a hollow. Unless she attracts a new mate the nesting attempt will fail.


Powerful Owl male
Powerful Owl male
Also of interest locally is an influx of Musk Lorikeets on Bribie Island. Between 50 and 70 were feeding in bloodwoods at Buckleys Hole when I visited and they have been seen regularly at several sites on the island. They've also been about Brisbane so it appears there's a significant movement of the species into South-East Queensland, where it is normally a rare visitor, from the southern states; this may be due to poor flowering seasons further south.

Musk Lorikeets

Musk Lorikeets
A somewhat distant pair of Grey Goshawks at North Arm was nice.



Thursday 19 April 2018

Camping at Yandilla, Conondale Range

Masked Owl

Good birds at Yandilla Farmstay, the adjoining Conondale National Park and the nearby Kilcoy Abattoir ponds included Masked Owl, Red-browed Treecreeper, Glossy Black Cockatoo, Painted Buttonquail, Plum-headed Finch and Black-tailed Native-hen.

Conondale National Park (southern end)
We camped for 3 nights at Yandilla Farmstay at the northern end of Mt Kilcoy Road. A bit of the history and further information about the place can be found here. It's a pleasant spot with running creeks nestled in the southern foothills of the Conondale Range. A walking trail leads upstream a short way from the property into Conondale National Park. Facilities are basic, with warmish showers available late-afternoon after a tank fire is lit by the property owner (who, it should be warned, is extremely talkative!)

Camping at Yandilla

Kilcoy Creek, Yandilla
Late one afternoon a pair of Glossy Black Cockatoos came down to the camp to drink; they are seen here regularly.

Glossy Black Cockatoo
Other nice birds about the property included Eastern Barn Owl (calling), Dusky Woodswallow and White-breasted Cuckoo-shrike.

White-bellied Cuckoo-shrike
A Wedge-tailed Eagle soared overhead and a pair of Bush Stone-Curlews near the homestead was nice. [Yandilla elist].

Bush Stone-Curlew

Wedge-tailed Eagle
During my wanderings around the property I spotted a group of introduced Red Deer. Red-necked and Swamp wallabies were also about.

Red Deer
From the farmstay (you need to open a couple of gates going in or out) it is 1 km to the end of Mt Kilcoy Road. Then a vehicular track in quite good condition heads steeply up into Conondale National Park. It passes through dry sclerophyll forest, where I located a party of Painted Buttonquail on a level stretch of the track; the male is in these images.

Painted Buttonquail

Painted Buttonquail
I stopped 4km from the park entrance at the first substantial fork in the road. Crimson Rosellas seemed to be fairly common here in the wet sclerophyll forest that dominated at this higher altitude.

Crimson Rosella
Then I heard a Red-browed Treecreeper, a species I had seen just once in the region since moving to the Sunshine Coast in 2009. I tracked the bird down to a grey gum it was feeding in. I've suggested previously that this species and others in the region have declined in recent decades, possible due to climate change. Red-browed Treecreeper in the 1970s was regularly encountered in the Blackall and Conondale ranges but the bird has disappeared from favoured haunts. So to find it here was an unexpected treat.

Red-browed Treecreeper
I ventured back up the range at night with owling on my mind, and was thrilled to find a beautiful female Masked Owl by the track about half-way up. [Elist Conondale NP].

Masked Owl
In the same spot was a Yellow-bellied Glider; always a pleasure to see this endearing marsupial, especially so close.

Yellow-bellied Glider

Yellow-bellied Glider
On the way back from (and on the way to) Yandilla Farmstay, we dropped by the Kilcoy abattoir dams on Winya Road. Yellow-rumped Thornbill is a scarce species in the Sunshine Coast hinterland but is regular here. Royal and Yellow-billed Spoonbills were on the dams.

Royal Spoonbill & Yellow-billed Spoonbill

Yellow-rumped Thornbill
A party of 10 Australasian Shovelers was present. Also of interest were a flock of 15 Plum-headed Finches, and 2 Black-tailed Native-hens which showed briefly.


Australasian Shoveler 
Completely unexpected was a Great Crested Grebe which flew overhead; this bird is not often seen in flight. [Winya Rd elist].

Great Crested Grebe





Saturday 7 April 2018

Regent Honeyeater in the spotlight



Regent Honeyeater - Capertee 
A dazzling combination of vibrant colours explodes from a cluster of pink mugga ironbark flowers. A Regent Honeyeater attacks the flowers with gusto before another honeyeater, then another appears. An estimated 10–12 honeyeaters are present, flitting between ironbarks and yellow box trees on a grassy woodland slope in Capertee National Park, on the western fringe of the Blue Mountains World Heritage Area in NSW.
Regent Honeyeater adult & juvenile - Capertee
I had seen the critically endangered Regent Honeyeater just three times over close to 50 years of birding - once at Storm King Dam near the NSW-Queensland border; once at Stanmore in south-east Queensland; and once at Glenbrook, west of Sydney. To see them again at Capertee was a joy. What was particularly encouraging was that two recently fledged juveniles were among the group, so they had nested successfully in the area. In another part of the Capertee Valley the next day, I found a second group of 3-4 birds, so my life tally of encounters with this species almost doubled in two days.
Extensive clearing of its woodland habitat in south-east Australia for agriculture, combined with an explosion in populations of the aggressive Noisy Miner, has pushed this beautiful bird to the brink, with its population estimated as low as 400-500, down from about 1,500 in the 1990s. BirdLife Australia, in co-operation with other groups, is engaged in a well-targeted and energetic program to rehabilitate the habitat of the Regent Honeyeater and other declining woodland birds, while a captive breeding program is trying to boost honeyeater numbers.
Box-ironbark woodland - Gwydir River, NSW
Hundreds of people are lending a hand with tree-planting in NSW and Victoria as part of the Regent Honeyeater Project. It's one of Australia's biggest volunteer-based conservation programs, with more than 1,800 hectares of core honeyeater habitat being targeted for revegetation in north-east Victoria, Captertee Valley and the Gwydir River area, west of Armidale in NSW.
Now, it is possible the tide is turning. An annual survey organised in NSW last August by BirdLife Australia – not long before I saw the birds in Capertee - resulted in 53 sightings. This was significantly higher than surveys over the preceding five years, when an average of 10-15 birds were counted annually. Fair-sized flocks of Regent Honeyeaters were seen regularly in the Capertee and Lower Hunter valleys of NSW in particular.
Revegatation project - Gwydir River, NSW
In the Chiltern-Mt Pilot National Park of Victoria, a former stronghold for the species, increasing numbers of captive bred birds appear to be surviving in the wild; 101 captive bred birds were released there in 2017, the largest of five such releases. Two birds found in March this year in Gippsland had travelled 200 kilometres since their release at Chiltern in 2017. This follows another bird released in 2015 which crossed the Great Dividing Range to South Gippsland in 2016, before returning to attempt to nest at Chiltern in 2017 – a round trip of 540 kilometres, the longest recorded movement of the species.
Captive breeding programs for endangered species do not always work, and may perversely have adverse consequences. But the Taronga Zoo-based Regent Honeyeater program could be on track following earlier challenges, when released birds evidently failed to survive.
Captive bred birds struggle to nest successfully; during the 2015 season at Chiltern, 64 per cent of nesting attempts failed to reach the egg stage. However, more than 70 per cent of released birds were alive 10 weeks after release, which BirdLife Australia's Regent Honeyeater recovery co-ordinator, Dean Ingwersen, describes as an “excellent figure by translocation/release standards”. Dean adds that the rate at which released captive birds are being seen 12 months post-release almost matches the rate of resightings of banded wild birds: “We think this is demonstrating good long-term survival of released birds.”
Regent Honeyeater, Capertee
Congregating in flocks was a hallmark of the species; the birds I saw at Storm King Dam, back in 1973, were in a flock of 15. Increasingly, however, records of the species over the ensuing decades were of single birds, pairs, or at best, small flocks. This reduction in flocking may reduce the ability of the species to defend itself again hordes of Noisy Miners, which are intolerant of other species. Field researchers have established that controlling Noisy Miner numbers in the box-ironbark woodlands favoured by Regent Honeyeaters boosts the chances of the latter nesting successfully. The flocks just might be making a comeback, with as many as 20 birds seen together in the Lower Hunter.
It is too early, however, to be popping the champaign corks. Recent increases in sightings may be due to unusually good flowering events, and the long-term picture remains uncertain at best. Populations of other woodland birds such as Grey-crowned Babbler, Hooded Robin and Black-chinned Honeyeater continue to decline. Conversely, numbers of Noisy Miners appear to be ever rising, and keeping them in check in the favoured haunts of the Regent Honeyeater is a huge logistical challenge. With the species estimated to have lost greater than 85 per cent of its habitat to the bulldozer, extensive areas of woodland continues to be cleared at unacceptable rates in Queensland and in NSW.
A sign in Capertee Valley
Dean Ingwersen points to new challenges, including the recently discovered problem of nests being predated by sugar gliders and squirrel gliders. Various research programs underway - in conjunction with captive breeding, habitat rehabilitation and other measures - hold the key to future solutions. Funding has been secured to attach satellite transmitters to five wild birds to track their movements. This is aimed at determining where the birds go to over summer, when records of Regent Honeyeater are scant. Funding has also been secured for trial interventions at nests to improve breeding success, with nest failure identified as a major impediment to the recovery of the species.
Says Dean: “The recovery team has worked tirelessly over the past couple of years to produce a robust and holistic recovery plan, and we are incorporating new research findings going forward as they arise... The whole recovery program is still a work in progress, and not surprisingly we’ve had some failures so far, but we’re trying hard to make our work as adaptive as possible.”

Regent Honeyeater - Capertee