Magic moments of winter bird monitoring

Posted on 8 August, 2015 by Tanya Loos

One of the joys of bird monitoring is the experience of magic moments: special points of time and place that stand out in the mind as truly special. Connecting Country’s winter bird monitoring has been completed for the 2015 year, involving two surveys at each of the 54 sites, which totals 108 ‘twenty minute – two hectare’ surveys. Here are a few of the magic moments from this winter’s wet and windy efforts!

While looking for the typical, tiny bush bird shapes in the foliage on the side of a hill in Metcalfe Conservation Reserve, I was completely taken aback by the sight of a huge Wedge-tailed Eagle taking off from the ground just metres in front of me, closely followed by another, younger bird. They had been eating a dead kangaroo, and the pair perched nearby in a paddock tree watching me closely as I completed the survey.

Speckled Warblers are not often encountered; they are a small, ground-foraging woodland bird somewhat like a scrubwren, with attractive streaky plumage. One lucky afternoon I had brilliant views of two foraging in rocky grassy undergrowth at the Nuggettys, then observed another at a direct seeding site in Maldon, foraging on the ground with thornbills and Scarlet Robins.

This year I have had the fortunate opportunity to set up a number of new bird monitoring sites (eight in total) with landholders who have past or present Connecting Country revegetation projects on their properties. After surveying a direct seeding site in the Blue Hills area, myself and the landholders went for a walk and we were rewarded with a brilliant session; dozens of bird species including Hooded Robins, Jacky Winters, Brown Treecreepers and culminating in a pair of Crested Shrike-tits doing a courtship wing shivering display. Magic!

This striking male Crested Shrike-tit was photographed by Geoff Park, and featured on his blog Natural Newstead.

If you are interested in a revegetation project on your property, call Jarrod Coote at the Connecting Country office on 5472 1594 to find out more.

And for those of you who are enjoying the birds on your property; watch this space, as we will be going out on another outing in early September.

by Tanya Loos, Habitat for Bush Birds Project Coordinator.

Australian Bird Index launched

Posted on 17 July, 2015 by Tanya Loos

On Wednesday (15 July 2015), BirdLife Australia launched the Australian Bird Index. This ground-breaking research measures the health of Australia’s terrestrial bird populations.  For the first time, vast quantities of data collected by volunteers and researchers have been analyzed to produce indices that help track Australia’s current state of biodiversity.

Just as the Consumer Price Index is a useful tool to evaluate the nation’s economy, The Australian Bird Index is a tool to quantify the overall health of the environment – using birds as the barometer.

The Bird Index has come about thanks to 15 years of citizen science data collection: comprising 14 million records and 900,000 surveys from across Australia – including many from the Mount Alexander region.

A Purple-crowned Lorikeet by Chris Tzaros – pic from Connecting Country’s Woodland Bird Brochure

Now that Connecting Country is an affiliated organization with BirdLife Australia, both the data we collect for our long term monitoring program, and the data you submit,  will be shared with BirdLife to assist in this important work.

So how are we faring? In order to make sense of the data, the Australian Bird Index breaks Australia up into nine regions: for example, the Mount Alexander Shire occurs entirely within the South-east Mainland region.  In the South-east Mainland, dry woodland and forest dependent parrots are showing distinct downward trends over the last 13 years. These species include Purple-crowned, Musk and Little Lorikeets, Crimson Rosella and Yellow-tailed Black-cockatoo.

But we see Crimson Rosellas all the time, I hear you say – this is the tricky thing about analyzing the data over a large area – in some areas the rosellas may actually be steady or even increasing, whereas across other areas, rosellas are dropping out of the  picture entirely. As such, BirdLife researchers plan to carry out further research for the comprehensive State of Australia’s Birds report planned for early release in 2016. For more on the Australian Bird Index and the upcoming report:  see here

The Australian Bird Index can tell us that the Purple-crowned Lorikeet has declined markedly, but not why this beautiful little bird has been reported as declining.  Again – further research is required to tease out some answers. My guess is that the changing weather patterns are playing havoc with the flowering of the eucalypts that these tiny blossom nomads rely upon.

Geoff Park has recently posted some stunning photos of the Purple-crowned Lorikeet (click here)  and it is great to hear that readers of his blog have reported seeing this species in good numbers.

Report from Tanya Loos, Habitat for Bush Birds Coordinator