Skip to main content

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

Popular posts from this blog

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!

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 Queensland: Photos and stories from my roadtrip north

Earlier this month, I drove up to Airlie Beach in the Whitsunday Region to celebrate the 40th birthday of my close friend, Kat. Photo by Luke Martin. Our time there overlapped for one weekend, in which we enjoyed swims, drinks, hearty dinners and a sailing adventure around the islands. The celebrations and wonderful catch-ups flew by quickly, but when Kat and her husband Luke flew back down south on Sunday, I still had a week's worth of time at my disposal to explore the nature of Queensland's coast. I started with a journey into the forests of Conway National Park, just a ten minute drive east of Airlie Beach. I spent a sunny, humid morning walking up to the peak of Mount Rooper, through vine scrub and eucalypt forest. It was exhilarating!  I immediately saw a new species of bird for me in the carpark there, a female olive-backed sunbird (Cinnyris jugularis). After so much rain earlier in the week, the forest floor was also teeming with amazing fungi! After lunch back in town,