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STILL GOT IT

A Powerful Owl, doing its best to keep the local population of possums under control

MY PAL ALAN MCBRIDE always used to joke that he’d still got it, well I am happy to report that he still has! I spent a great couple of days birding around Alan’s newish local patch of Melbourne before my recent Birdquest tour downunder mostly in search of a day roosting Powerful Owl for the incoming group. Well, it took us longer than anticipated but almost 20,000 steps later we found one, with a little help from another friend Field Guides’ Chris Benesh. Using eBird can sometimes be frustrating as recent waypoints are not always accurate and sightings are not up-to-date enough, so it is often a good idea to go and take a look first. One site we visited was a nest hole, which had been vacated in the previous week and was now occupied by a Sulphur-crested Cockatoo, another day roosting spot had simply been deserted. So it was a relief when we set eyes on this massive creature peering down at us in a public park in downtown Melbourne, early office workers passing by under it, morning coffee in hand. It ultimately stayed put for the group and almost as good was the excellent Garden View Cafe right next to the park! We love a good pie shop! A tour of Alan’s local patch, the Western Water Treatment Plant at Werribee was also very worthwhile, producing some ace views of trickier species like Musk Duck and Baillon’s and Australian Crakes. This spot also has a great cafe within easy reach, no wonder Alan spends so much time here. There are kilometres of drivable tracks around pools, many of which are filled with birds. What a brilliant place! We stopped at another excellent bakery, Oaks in Anglesey on our way to Point Roadknight, where by chance we bumped into Chris, Jesse Fagan and their Field Guides group, watching Hooded Plovers and Pacific Gulls, it’s a small birding world indeed. Thanks Alan!

He’s still got it!

Musk Duck, another of Australia’s unqiue avifauna

Australian Crake at Werribee, very confiding!

Baillon’s Crake seems to be easier to see in Australia than anywhere else I’ve been

The primitive Cape Barren Goose is a weird bird indeed, it has established a small foothold at Werribee

A pair of Pacific Gulls hanging around a fur seal at Point Roadknight

Ready for action!

It’s amazing where you can find Inger Vandyke’s images! Here’s one in Alan’s apartment.

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MOUNTAIN PEACOCK PHEASANT

Mountain Peacock Pheasant, Bukit Tinggi

MOUNTAIN PEACOCK PHEASANT is a ‘one site bird’, although it occurs more widely throughout the highlands of Peninsular Malaysia, it can only be seen regularly at one place in the world - Bukit Tinggi in Pahang state, around an hour and a half drive from the Kuala Lumpur’s international airport. In a nutshell it took me three days to see one! Things have changed at Bukit Tinggi. Whether it is the fact that fewer Malay bird photographers now visit this spot (so the food put out to lure the peacock pheasant has diminished), or the disturbance caused by a large fallen tree, or the establishment of an ill-considered second screen (where any watchers are silhouetted by the rising sun), or simply that the birds’ behaviour has been changed by some other factor, who knows? What I can say is that it did not appear on two of the days I spent at the tiny feeding station screen. I had seen so many images of these beautiful birds against the backdrop I was now looking at, that it felt like I had already seen one. Imagining what it would be like if and when one turned up during the many hours I spent staring at the same scene, it was a very exciting moment when a fine male finally walked out of the forest and onto the old trail. WOW! The traversing of KL’s ridiculously complex traffic system (I did wonder if it might be possible to go round and round and run out of petrol before following the correct off ramp), the very odd accommodation in Bukit Tinggi’s Colmar Tropicale resort (modelled on the Alsatian town of Colmar!) and many hours of sitting on the muddy forest floor watching nothing most of the time proved worthwhile. I do wonder how long it might last at Bukit Tinggi before something brings this wonderful opportunity to a close, so sooner rather than later probably applies yet again.

Every now and again there were some nice distractions while waiting for the peacock pheasant. A beautiful male Siberian Blue Robin was present each morning (but not in the afternoon), freshly arrived for the winter from Russia, Buff-breasted Babblers and Ochraceous Bulbuls also showed an interest in the feeding station and Brown-backed Needletails zoomed around high over the forest. On one afternoon a group of gorgeous Dusky Langurs moved noisily through the trees overhead. On another occasion a small mammal was rooting around under the fallen tree trunks, I thought it must be a rat of some kind but I was surprised to see that it had a long snout like a treeshrew. It was actually a Gymure, a soft-furred hedgehog, presumably Max’s Hylomys maxi on distribution/altitude. It was nice to be back in the forest in this region after 20 years! I also met some very nice birders from Singapore, Sebastian Ow, Eunice Kong and their friends. All incredibly quiet and polite! Unlike the couple who spent one morning blasting playback from the other screen, seemingly oblivious to the main position and I heard later from James Eaton that Ferruginous Partridge does not like incessant playback anyway. The partridges have not visited regularly in recent months. There were also some flashy butterflies around, but unfortunately not the big one I was hoping for, that would have to wait until Fraser’s Hill in a couple of days time. I could hear Siamangs calling while up on the ridge and I descended down through the Japanese Garden in their direction but their far carrying whooping calls were coming from somewhere out of reach way down in the valley below. Driving back to the highway I was happy to finally catch sight of a family group of this impressive large black gibbon, the huge male swinging through the trees.

Leopard Lacewing Cethosia cyane, Bukit Tinggi Japanese Garden

Dwarf Crow Euploea tulliolus, Bukit Tinggi Japanese Garden

Siberian Blue Robin

Siberian Blue Robin

Siamang, Bukit Tinggi

Dusky Langur

Presumed Max’s Gymnure Hylomys maxi, Bukit Tinggi

Stormy skies over the forest ridges at Bukit Tinggi

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MINAHASA HOODED PITTA

A Minahasa Hooded Pitta emerges from an old hard drive, Gunung Tangkoko 2006 (Mike Watson)

AS A BIRDER, if you were only allowed one book, then ‘All the Birds of the World’ by Josep del Hoyo, published by Lynx would be it! I bought a copy during the first pandemic lockdown, with the intention of copying my pal Pete Morris’s idea of adding gold stickers to the birds I’ve seen. Spectrum alert! First of all I would have to figure out which birds I’d seen - I’ve never kept a world life list but I do have all my records consisting of various notebooks and papers so it was a feasible task. Then I would be able to use the iGoTerra list to know which stickers to add to the book. In the end I never got around to this during the pandemic, there were too many other things to do with the extra free time, like birding itself. However, time ticks away and I find myself thinking there’s not so much of it left as there used to be. So, I sat down one day and finished the task of uploading sightings to our favourite listing service iGoTerra, taking until 3am next morning. It’s not that difficult if you just add fast track ticks (my next task is to add the details of the first observations, at least, later) but there’s no way I could remember all those fancy-named hummingbirds and obscure tryant flycatchers (the world’s two largest bird families) so I had to do a lot of checking of notes and paper checklists. Can you imagine how many taxonomic and name changes there have been since my first visit outside the WP in 1990? It’s been great fun reliving past trips and checking how taxonomic changes have affected what I have seen. I reached my favourite bird family, pittas and saw the page in ATBOW almost filled with the new species resulting from the splitting of the Red-bellied complex. Why had we not tried harder to see one on Sulawesi, or Halmahera, or New Britain? Oh dear! Another spectrum alert! I did see one on Batanta island though - now Papuan Pitta - the same species, some of which spend the Austral summer in Australia’s Iron Range.

I fared better with hooded pittas, by chance seeing three out of the new four species. Western Hooded Pitta in Thailand and Eastern Hooded Pitta in PNG and to my surprise, the hooded pitta we saw way back in 2006 on Gunung Tangkoko in Northern Sulawesi is now split as Minahasa Hooded Pitta. I mentioned this to Pete at work, and he hurriedly checked his list to find that he had not seen the former subspecies forsteni! Surprising as there are hardly any birds I’ve seen that he hasn’t among his 9000+, including almost 40 pittas. Even more surprising, there are hardly any records of Minahasa Hooded Pitta on eBird, and no photos. The headline photo is even of some vegetation, from which one was calling by Pam Rasmussen! There are a few scattered records of it all along the octopus tentacle-like Minahasa Peninsula of Northern Sulawesi and I am sure that now it is split as a separate species more effort will be made to look for it.

A little about our encounter on 13 September 2006. Juhász Tibor and Ványi Robi, along with Stuart Warren had arranged to camp on Gunung Tangkoko through local birder Untu Baware, primarily for Scaly-breasted Kingfisher. We saw staggered about three quarters of the way up the mountain and camped overnight, completing the next hour or so to the forested summit before dawn the next morning, where we saw the kingfisher. We descended slowly back to the camp for something to eat around lunchtime, and there was simply a hooded pitta in the forest around the camping area. It was quite obliging and allowed some decent photos but the morning belonged to the kingfisher. Fast forward 18 years to the present day and it seems the morning really belonged to the pitta, although we had no idea of this at the time. Happy memories of an exciting trip to the forest paradise of Indonesia with friends, some of whom are no longer with us - Robi, Kris Tindige and now dear Theo Henoch, who passed away last month. ‘Time is shorter than you think so let’s go’ Nick 13.

All the Birds of the World (which was too early to see the Minahasa Hooded Pitta split)- buy some gold stickers and have some fun!

The dormant volcano, Gunung Tangkoko towers over the surrounding landscape (Ványi Robért)

Scaly-breasted Kingfisher, Gunung Tangkoko (Mike Watson)

Stuart Warren (front), Ványi Robért and Juhász Tibor on Gunung Tangkoko (Mike Watson)

Tropical rainforest on the slopes of Gunung Tangkoko (Mike Watson)

Ványi Robért RIP (Mike Watson)

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WRECKED SEABIRDS IN RIBCHESTER

Pomarine Skua, Red Bank, Ribchester 4 November 2023

4 NOVEMBER and a photo of an adult skua is posted on a Ribchester residents Facebook page! It is apparently on the path between Boat House and Red Bank, my old local patch. I have walked this path hundreds of times! Within minutes Lee Parnell has zoomed along there and confirmed it as a Pomarine Skua! The first ever twitchable in the ELOC area! Sadly it is not in a good state, appearing exhausted. I was there soon afterwards and we figured out what to do. After lots of phone calls, including to a RSPCA inspector who lives in Rib, we were no further forward. No-one cares about wrecked seabirds anymore, maybe owing to the AI risk? So, with no facilities to look after it, we left it to take its chances and it was inevitably found dead next morning. A sad end for a magnificent bird.

Just over a month earlier, on 29 September, Phil Larkin reported a Northern Gannet in his Ribchester garden!!! Another storm-blown seabird and only slightly more regular in East Lancs than the Pom. The gannet’s fate was uncertain, it was captured in Boyce’s Brook and released on the river. It lingered a while but then disappeared. Now this bird had definitely encountered AI, with one balckened iris. Whether or not it was still suffering is not known but its occurrence was following another severe storm so it may have simply been an AI survivor?

Northern Gannet, Greenside, Ribchester 29 September 2023

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