Little Crake and Waders in Southern Turkey

I found a Little Crake this morning along a canal near my hotel in the southern Turkey town of Tasucu. This was a much-wanted species.

In a nearby area of swamp in the Goksu Delta I found some nice waders such as this Ruff

 Green Sandpiper and

Temminck's Stint

Birding around Ancient Ruins in Southern Turkey

The Silifke area of southern Turkey is best known to birders for the Goksu Delta wetlands but sites around the stunning ancient ruins of Oba Diocaesarea nearby provide some excellent birding as well as a top-rate cultural experience. It is little known that two key Turkey birds - Kruper's Nuthatch and Ruppell's Warbler - can be found here.

Just short of the ruins is a large picnic area in the beautiful open pine forest. Here I found several Kruper's Nuthatches, a bird almost endemic to Turkey. The nuthatches were feeding on breadcrumbs on the ground and on picnic tables.

 Around the ruins and along the road below them were numbers of Western Rock Nuthatches, with the black line through the eye much narrower than the Eastern Rock Nuthatches seen earlier in the trip. Also in scrub along the road up from the town of Silifke I found several Ruppell's Warblers.

Some more common species included Eurasian Hoopoe,

and another Turkish specialty, Cretzschmar's Bunting.

Before reaching the coast we checked out the Eregli area further north, where the extensive wetlands have been drained and a magnificant habitat for waterbirds destroyed. Still, we found a Stone-Curlew and Calandra Lark here.

Birding in the Central Turkey Highlands

We were up at 3.30am for the bone-rattling drive on the back of a tractor up a narrow road to be high up in the Ala Daglar Mountains near the village of Demirkazik. This was awe-inspiring scenery at 3500m. Our aim was to see Caspian Snowcock, and as the sun rose over the mountains, the bird's eerie call resounded from the steep cliffs surrounding us. We eventually saw several snowcocks in flight. A bonus was a distant group of Ibex making their way along a ridge top, their presence given away by the sound of falling rocks.

.Good birds up there included Red-fronted Serin and Crimson-winged Finch.  With me (left), our driver (right) and Glenn (snapper) was Basir Safak (centre) whose family has run a small ecotourism business in the area for many years. There is no way to see the snowcock other than to hire the tractor.

There were plenty of Finsch's Wheatears (above), another bird that can be tricky, in the rocky terrain of the mountain slopes.

Birding in the Gizantep area of Southern Turkey

This week I had a late afternoon and an early morning around Durnalick, a village near the city of Gizantep that is well-known as a site for several difficult-to-find birds, such as the Desert Finch above. This was one of several birds coming to drink in an orchard not far from the village.

Not a great picture but the Eastern Rock Nuthatch is a special bird of this area - a colony isolated by considerable distances from its main populations further east. I was able to notice differences later with the similar Western Rock Nuthatch, with the black eye line much wider in the Eastern. Other good birds I saw included three buntings - Black-headed, Cretzschmar's and Cinereous.

I had party of eight Chukars and more common species such as the Rufous-tailed Scrub-Robin (above), as well as Sombre Tit, Eastern Orphean Warbler, Upcher's Warbler and White-throated Robin.

The Paradise Parrot and Eric Zillmann

Meet the Paradise Parrot, the only species of bird on the Australian mainland known to have become extinct.

And meet Eric Zillmann, the only person alive who has seen a Paradise Parrot.

It is about three quarters of a century since Eric Zillmann saw a Paradise Parrot, but the memory is as fresh as it is vivid. “I can see the bird now as clearly today as back then,” the renowned naturalist tells me from his home in Bundaberg, on the central Queensland coast.

Eric Zillmann, 88, is the only person alive who has seen the only bird known to have become extinct on the Australian mainland.  His last sighting of Psephotus pulcherrimus, in 1938, is also regarded as the final authentic record of this brilliantly coloured parakeet which has gone the way of the Tasmanian Tiger and the Dodo of Mauritius.

Eric was just 10 years old when he saw his first Paradise Parrot and all of 15 when he saw his last parrot five years later, but even at that age he was a keen student of natural history. “We grew up in the bush. We didn’t have TV or anything like that and we knew what we were looking at.” His family lived near Wallaville, 12km south-west of Gin Gin in the Burnett River Valley, southeast Queensland. It was the era of The Depression, and the family managed as best they could.

In 1933, the flooding of Currajong Creek damaged fencing and bridges on a unnamed 230-ha  property in the area, prompting the owner to sell it a friend of the Zillmanns. When the fencing was repaired, the owners  hired Eric and his father, Ernest,  to manage livestock. Their job was to muster and dip cattle, and during regular mustering forays, they would encounter the parrots.

“It used to be just the one pair of parrots each time we went out but we would always see them,” Eric says. “I remember the colours, the red flashing wing and the brownish back as the male took off in front of us. They would always be on the ground feeding when we found them. Sometimes we went out dipping once a month and they’d be there each time.”

Eric says the birds favoured short grasses in sparsely wooded country. “They were not shy. You could get to within 30 feet (about 10m) of them before they’d flush and fly off.”

In 1938, the Zillmanns and other workers were levelling termite mounds for the material that then formed the foundations for tennis courts. “We hired a two-ton truck and dug up 13 loads of ant bed.” After lopping off the top of a mound, Eric found a chamber containing four eggs.

He did not link the termite mound to the parrots, or finally identify the species of parrot he and his father had been seeing, until  he looked up a copy of A.J. Leach’s 1926 field guide, An Australian Bird Book. “That’s when we realised for sure what the birds were,” he says. “The existence of the birds had been known to people in the area but they were simply known to us as the anthill parrots. At that time, we did not know that the parrots were so rare.”

A steep decline in populations of the species began late in the 19^th Century, and the Paradise Parrot was extremely rare by the 1920s. Almost certainly, a combination of intensive grazing and modified fire regimes throughout its southern Queensland range was responsible for the demise of the species.

Eric left the Gin Gin area soon after discovering the egg chamber but his father continued to report the single pair of Paradise Parrots until 1940. Much later than these sightings, Eric became involved in searches for the lost parakeet in the 1960s. He was shown the same termite mound where, in 1922, Cyril Jerrard took his historic photographs of the Paradise Parrot near the Burnett River. Visits by Eric to the area where he saw the parrots as a teenager proved fruitless.

Eric’s sightings are acknowledged in Penny Olsen’s seminal book on the Paradise Parrot, Glimpses of Paradise – The Quest for the Beautiful Parakeet (2007).

Eric Zillman has been awarded an OAM and an honorary tertiary degree for his services to natural history. His abilities in the field with birds and other wildlife - and his knowledge of natural history in the Wide Bay-Burnett region of Queensland - is legendary. Eric is reluctant these days to tell his story about the Paradise Parrot, but he appreciates the value of his unique experience. “I can’t prove now the identity of what we saw but in my mind I know what they were. I am humbled by what I regard as the most uplifting experience of my life.”

Brush-turkeys in your garden

Residents in subtropical and tropical eastern Australia have long faced the dilemma of what to do about the destruction wrought on their gardens by the Australian Brush-turkey. The birds scratch up large quantities of leaf litter for their nesting mounds, frequently resulting in extensive damage to gardens. Following problems with the birds in my Sunshine Coast garden, I initiated a Facebook discussion which resulted in a novel solution. The strategic placement of a large mirror will drive the bird away. That happened in my case, with the bird calling it quits after a couple of days fighting its image in the mirror.

Update 2012.
After putting the mirror away when the male bird was deterred last season, he was back for the beginning of the current nesting season last week. After again digging up half the garden, the mirror was back in place. Another bout of fiurious fighting with its reflection, and the bird again backed down and has left us in peace.

Sunshine Coast July 2011 Pelagic

Buller’s Albatross and three species of storm-petrel, including White-bellied and Black-bellied, were the highlights of the inaugural pelagic birding trip off Queensland’s Sunshine Coast.

Our 10m catamaran, the Cat-A-Pult, departed Mooloolaba Harbour at 0700 hours, with the air temperature a crisp 5*C. Although encountering moderate westerlies and a mild swell not far from shore, we reached the Mooloolaba Wide area at the edge of the continental shelf at 0840 hours - a relatively quick trip to the shelf. We encountered little inshore, with brief views of distant Fluttering Shearwaters for some and a smattering of Australasian Gannets and Crested Terns. At the shelf, 31 nautical miles from shore and at a depth of 200m, our sharp-eyed skipper, Paddy, began laying a berley trail. It was not long before the first Providence Petrels (above) appeared.

Soon after, a Buller’s Albatross arrived to feed on the berley, albeit at some distance. It was followed later in the morning by the first of two sightings (probably of the same bird) of a White-bellied Storm-Petrel.  Wilson’s Storm-Petrels and Hutton’s Shearwaters flew in to the berley and Providence Petrels were in attendance constantly as we drifted with the trail for 7 nautical miles E-NE to a depth of 400m. At 12:30 hours, we began retracing the route of the berley trail, seeing a Buller’s Albatross which presumably was a different bird because it had a paler head. 

Shortly before leaving the shelf at 14:00 hours, close to the point where we had arrived a little over 5 hours earlier, a Black-bellied Storm-Petrel offered nice views. This was the only Fregatta storm-petrel that we managed to photograph. There was no sign of the New Zealand Storm-Petrel seen off Southport recently. We returned to the harbour at 15:30 hours.

Conditions were sunny and pleasant, with a gentle 5-knot south-westerly for most of the day - apart from the rough patch early in the day - and visibility was excellent. Maximum air temperature was 19*C.

The only mammals seen were 4 Humpback Whales heading north.

Participants: Paul Barden, Marcus Clarke, Ken Cross, Paddy Dimond (skipper), Glen Gyldenlove, Bob James, Ray Kellman, Kate Kellman, Rob Kernot, Dave Metcalf, Owen Prowse, Greg Roberts (organiser), Brian Willey.

Conditions were sunny and pleasant, with a gentle 5-knot south-westerly for most of the day - apart from the rough patch early in the day - and visibility was excellent. Maximum air temperature was 19*C.

The only mammals seen were 4 Humpback Whales heading north.

Participants: Paul Barden, Marcus Clarke, Ken Cross, Paddy Dimond (skipper), Glen Gyldenlove, Bob James, Ray Kellman, Kate Kellman, Rob Kernot, Dave Metcalf, Owen Prowse, Greg Roberts (organiser), Brian Willey.


List of species with totals seen: 

Providence Petrel (Pterodroma solandri)	50
Greater Crested Tern (Thalasseus bergii)	40
Australasian Gannet (Morus serrator)	15
Silver Gull (Chroicocephalus novaehollandiae)	8
Fluttering Shearwater (Puffinus gavia)	4
Hutton's Shearwater (Puffinus huttoni)	2
Buller's Albatross (Thalassarche bulleri)	2
White-bellied Storm Petrel (Fregetta grallaria)	1
Wilson's Storm Petrel (Oceanites oceanicus)	2
Australian Pied Cormorant (Phalacrocorax varius)	2
Black-bellied Storm Petrel (Fregetta tropica)	1