When family fights: a drama on the mudflats

At Victoria Point on Sunday, the tide was out and I watched an interesting interaction between two bird species.

One of them was a white-faced heron (Egretta novaehollandiae) that had been foraging on the mudflats for quite some time already.

It was eventually joined by a little egret (Egretta garzetta). As you can tell from the genus of both species, they are closely related - essentially, you could call the heron a grey egret, and the egret a white heron if you wanted to.

The egret began to forage by trailing the heron quite closely. Graham Pizzey in his excellent field guide notes that this behaviour by the egret allows it to capture prey items escaping unnoticed by the other bird.

There was a certain invisible ring of comfort/discomfort around the heron, however, and whenever the egret crossed that barrier, the heron would become visibly bothered and rebuke the space invader (see the photo at the top of this page also).

After several confrontations, the egret learned its lesson and backed off, opting to forage by itself. Interestingly, both birds utilised a 'mud-puddling' technique to find prey, where they stir up murky water with one foot to see what will swim out. Below is a photo of the heron doing this - you can see its body weight is supported by one leg as the other is swirled around in the water.

Comments

North Queensland Trip, Part 1.

Eungella National Park Eungella National Park location; Image courtesy of Google Maps. My home state of Queensland is a huge place. Bigger than any of the United States, it is considered the sixth largest sub-national entity in the world, behind such remote provinces as Nunavut in Canada, and the Danish territory of Greenland. Though I've lived in and travelled through Europe and Canada, much of my birthplace remains a mystery to me. To rectify this situation, I planned a road-tripping holiday this year with my sister and her partner, in the Northern section of the state. My first visit to anywhere in the Tropics, I have since returned home with some of the most amazing wildlife experiences possible!

Tadpoles of South-eastern Australia: A Guide With Keys

Book review Reed New Holland Publishing, 2002. It’s noon on a warm autumn day and I am driving south along Beaudesert Road towards the peripheral suburbs of Brisbane’s southside that remain largely a mystery to me. I have decided that not knowing the amphibian fauna inhabiting the suburb of Algester is a personal error that I simply must rectify. My favourite way to search for frogs is to go spotlighting on humid spring and summer nights, but I have left it a little late this year and doubt my chances at finding them now that the evenings have mercifully turned cooler. Instead, I am going to survey the local amphibian population in a way that is quite new to me, aided by a secret weapon sitting in the passenger seat next to me: Marion Anstis’s book, Tadpoles of South-eastern Australia: A Guide With Keys .

Wild Plants of Ipswich

I've never really taken much notice of plants until recently, regarding them usually as just the thing that a bird perches on while you're watching it. This week I decided it was time to change that attitude by trying my hand at plant identification in Denmark Hill Conservation Park, located in the centre of Ipswich. The park is just 11.5 hectares in size, but preserves a patch of bushland that acts as an 'island refuge' in a sea of suburbia. I did my best to focus on the trees and not be too distracted by birds or the resident Koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) population, and came up with nine interesting trees and plants seen on the Water Tower Circuit.

Wild BNE

Search This Blog