Wild BNE

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,...

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). Af...

In May earlier this year, I had the honour of being invited to participate in the Cooloola BioBlitz as a Team Leader. Over the course of a weekend, I led two groups of lovely people around various sites near Rainbow Beach, searching for and identifying as many life forms as we could find. These sightings were then uploaded to iNaturalist in order to paint a full picture of the biodiversity occurring on the Cooloola Coast. Here I will share some of the highlights from the weekend! MISTLETOES Both groups I took out into the bush found amazing mistletoes! The most stunning of them all was a long-flowered mistletoe (Dendrophthoe vitellina) parasitising a paperbark, which then had two other species of mistletoe on it—a layer cake of parasitism! With the help of LaTrobe Natural History lecturer Gregg Müller, those two species were identified as the leafless jointed mistletoe (Viscum articulatum) and the golden mistletoe (Notothixos subaureus). It was such a fascinating find that I returned ...

Having spent the three days prior in pandemic lockdown, I was keen to kick off my Easter weekend with a few hours spent in a forest. I also wanted to be able to sleep in a little on Good Friday, so I picked a place less than half an hour’s drive away to visit: Redlands Track Park in Alexandra Hills. Also known by the much better name of Scribbly Gums Conservation Area, this place is large and its trails are many! Though there were also many mountain-bikers, dog-walkers and other users of the park there during my visit, there were hour-long stretches where I didn’t see another soul, which is just how I like my forest time! It was that kind of day where the forest washes over me, lulling me into a mood so tranquil that I don’t so much as walk among the trees, but rather glide through them. I see so much when I feel this way. There is treasure everywhere. On this walk, it came in the form of a gorgeous pair of shaggy caps (Boletellus emodensis), emerging from the base of a dead goliath ne...

If only waders had gaudy colours like a rainbow lorikeet, or baby-sized proportions like a koala. If only they had a cheery song like the butcherbird, or icon status like the kangaroo. But no. To most, they are distant brown specks on a humble mud flat, not worth a second glance nor thought. The reality is that they are the best travellers on the entire planet . The birds right here in these photos taken at Wynnum on the weekend are great knots, and in four months time, these exact same birds will be nesting on upland tundra in north-east Russia. If they're lucky, that is. Because in the meantime, offleash dogs and beach walkers disturb them everyday, wasting the energy these birds need for a very long flight. The journey itself is perilous too: land reclamation in China and Korea is destroying the refuelling stops for these marathon athletes, and we have similar development plans here in Queensland . The unfortunate truth is that waders have climbed up endangered species lists v...

New housing developments are strange places. They feel like the scene of a disaster that unfolded just moments before you got there. You have to look past the new houses and clean cul-de-sacs, the fresh paint on the streetlamps. Start with the trees. See the lone survivor from the forest now no more? Exposed and alone, the wind blows it out of shape. See the native flower, in amongst the grass? A natural relic from an obliterated habitat. But these are not lifeless places—quite the opposite, in fact. There are all sorts of creatures wandering about, homeless trauma victims suddenly finding themselves on the edge of survival. It might be a koala up a power pole, where months earlier stood a red gum. It might be a brolga named Bruce , who wanders a floodplain now paved. Some animals do alright at first, like the kangaroos that are gifted with fresh lawns to graze, or the rainbow bee-eaters that enjoy the open space. It’s only later that their fortunes fade, when the landscape is given ov...

Today I woke to the sound of a butcherbird duet, a sign of life on an otherwise cold and still winter’s morning. Thinking they would make a good photography subject, I decided to see if I could follow my ears to track them down. Emerging onto the street outside my apartment block, I realised the singing was echoing off the tall buildings around me and that try as I might, I couldn’t quite pinpoint the direction it was coming from. In my room, I had felt like the sounds were coming from the direction of the main road, so I headed that way. The song was that of the pied butcherbird (Cracticus nigrogularis) specifically, a beautiful, full-bodied fluting sound, rich in melody and sung by the male and female together . At the main road, however, there were already cars passing by, and it made it hard to hear the still somewhat distant birds. After wandering a few blocks fruitlessly, I ended up walking away from the main road, towards houses and parkland. There, at the top of a Norfolk pine...

Ring-billed gull, Corolla, North Carolina. Gulls have always interested me, perhaps because despite there being over fifty different species of them around the world, only one is familiar to me as a Queensland resident.

A female flatback turtle, covering her nest chamber with sand on Mon Repos Beach. I kicked off the start of this summer with a short break up at Bargara, where I had a fantastic time! I’ll get to all the interesting animals and plants I saw in a minute, but first, let me just say how much I liked the actual region. Bundaberg struck me as a city with the perfect mix of old and new; lovely heritage buildings and structures and a laid-back attitude are complemented by the modern conveniences of good roads, internet access and seven-days-a-week shopping. And while I can see new suburbs popping up here and there, the region isn’t suffering the same intense overcrowding that Brisbane is at present. I loved it!  And now back to the wildlife! Here are some of the creatures and places that will be living in my heart for much longer than my holiday lasted.  Sea turtles If there’s one animal that Bundaberg's Coral Coast is particularly famous for, it’s the loggerhead turtle (C...

Morans Creek, O'Reilly. On a cool and overcast morning last Friday, I headed down to Lamington National Park and walked two tracks in the Green Mountains section near O’Reilly’s.

Cockatiel, Gatton.  A visit out to Gatton last Wednesday brought into sharp relief how badly drought-stricken our inland communities currently are. Below average rainfall and warm daily temperatures are baking rural regions of NSW and Queensland even through the winter, with some farmers describing it as “the worst drought in living memory.”

White-throated nightjar, Cedar Creek. A foray into Plunkett Regional Park last Saturday night resulted in many excellent wildlife sightings, the highlight being white-throated nightjars (Eurostopodus mystacalis) .

A peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus) flies over the rooftops on the Sunshine Coast. 2017 was a great year for adventures in the bush and encounters with incredible wildlife! Here’s some of the creatures, places and events that made an impact on me, and in some cases, the entire region:

Small-leaved lilly pilly, INSET: Australasian figbird (male), Bulimba. A sunny afternoon spent in Bulimba last Thursday afternoon offered up some great encounters with a variety of reptiles, birds and insects.

Jacky winter, Wallangarra. A drive out to the Stanthorpe region with a friend on Wednesday provided me with my first ever sighting of an Australian bird icon, the jacky winter (Microeca fascinans) .

One of the many adorable locals on the Bunya Mountains. It was my 34th birthday last month, and I celebrated it with a group of close friends out in the Bunya Mountains. I have only ever been to this place once before, as part of a weekend away with a birdwatching club when I was a teen. My memories of that experience are a little blurry with time, but I recall being enraptured by wallaby-packed hillsides, and an amazing sunrise. The wallabies— red-necked wallabies , to be precise—made a big impression on me this time as well! They’re everywhere on the mountaintop, whether it be in the National Park, in public areas or on private lawns! They’re also common here on the outskirts of Brisbane and in the surrounding shires, but locally they tend to be shy animals that are usually seen alone or in small groups. I suspect that their abundance and approachability at the Bunyas is a result of many generations of wallabies living there peacefully, with little to no hunting pressure or ha...

Encompassing a landscape quite unlike any other in South-east Queensland, Plunkett Regional Park is somewhere local nature enthusiasts should know. The landscape of Plunkett features a variety of sandstone outcrops, boulder formations, cliffs and caves.

Brown cuckoo-dove (Macropygia phasianella) , Redwood. Last Saturday, I took part in a ‘ Global Big Day ’ held by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and their birdwatching website, ‘ eBird ’. For the uninitiated, a ‘big day’ (or month, year, etc) is a birdwatching colloquialism that refers to the act of finding as many birds as possible within the designated timeframe, something which I had not partaken in before. I decided that I would try find 100 bird species or more out in Toowoomba, a place I have never visited.

White-faced heron (Egretta novaeholandiae) , Burpengary East. With the exceedingly hot start we’ve had to 2017, I’ve spent most of my “wildlife time” searching either for frogs in the comparative cool of the night , or in the water looking at fish . This week, however, a slightly cooler, unstable air mass swept in, and I decided to make the most of it with a full day of birding north of Brisbane.

Another year, another set of memories created with some of the most interesting wildlife on the planet, right here on Brisbane's doorstep. Among my twelve favourite wildlife sightings of the year, you'll notice more invertebrates this time around compared to previous lists; thank the array of amazing entomological field guides that are finally being published and are piquing my interest in this area. Without further ado, here are twelve fascinating animals I met this year: