Rufous Owl in The Botanical Gardens

This weekend has been a busy one for my birding, on Saturday morning it was the local wader watch with the group giving interested locals classes on how to distinguish the different species from the mass of similar looking birds. I did tell you this town is all about the wide open spaces and nothing else. So I went to collect my local birding guide 'Doc', at her new apartment, top floor overlooking the sea and local mangroves, it was an amazing view and while we were sat there I managed to see two new species for me, two small species of finch type birds,

Chestnut Breasted Mannikin



We had a cup of tea and then went of to meet the rest of the birding group just up the road at the rocks, these are where the waders rest while it is high tide and while they are sat resting we can all get a good look at them, once you have some experienced birder tell you what to look for it is easier to identify, not that it is easy after that but a little easier, as the difference in some is the size of its bill and at 50 meters it still isn't easy, i managed to catch about another 7 new species there. But as we were leaving someone suggested we all go and look for the Rufous owl in the Botanical gardens which are nest door to my apartment. We drove down and in this weather the gardens are really fantastic, full of blooms and millions of birds that tend to hide when i go to look for them. there were three of us who arrived and we walked all around the rainforest and the lower forest and then finally the higher forest and saw nothing, some of the more common birds but no Rufous Owl. This is a large owl and a ruthless predator, it eats big animals, like possoms and other large birds, but we still didn't see it, while were looking around the top car park area another group of the birders arrived and part of there group was the Northern Territory Champion Birder, she has won the local 24 hours spotting competition several times, so she was marching along to the local roosting spot and looked up into the dense canopy squinted and announced that the owl was hiding in the leaves, "Right There", pointing skyward, we were looking and could see nothing but leaves, we all started scrambling through the bushes and from closer and directly under the tree could finally see a huge owl in the uppermost branches. It was huge and just had amazing eyes, it was looking at us as we looked at it. But I am still amazed at how she was able to see it without any effort, i believe that she is the reincarnation of God Vishnu, the God of Maintenance, she doesn't have to look for them she knows of their presence. She has an uncanny ability to just know where the birds are. She also knows all the calls of the local birds, this is not normal.

Rufous Owl



Sunday birding, today I went on a local short trip to east point, which is an old military base where the Japanese bombed the crap out of and destroyed everything, apart from the military installations. We were looking for a particular dove, the crazy multi-coloured psychedelic, Rose crowned Fruit Dove, nobody but Lord Buddha could have thought up a more ridiculous colour scheme, it is just a really paint pot explosion, We walked all the way around the beach head and explored the old gun emplacements and underground bunkers and overground bunkers, but as we went from one fruiting tree to another we found nothing but our typical common birds, we then went all the way back round the beach and into the forested section, we found a water bath for the birds to drink and hoped to find the bird there, but all we saw was all the honeyeaters splashing and bathing, if you have never seen this behaviour before it is hilarious, they splash down like kingfishers, then spend ages shaking themselves dry, very funny and very entertaining but we then heard the special bird we were hunting. we walked across some sections of forest and ended up on a path and we saw what we thought was the bird fly over the path into a tree, we stalked up to the tree and found this crazy coloured bird hiding from us, it was just an amazing sight, just colurs like you cannot believe, that was it, our day was made, I had seen the dove, so to celebrate we went to have fish and chips in the local chippie, what more could you want.

Rose-crowned Fruit -Dove