Today, in spite of the rain, a longtime birding friend and I went to a nearby lake. It was a good day — nesting Little Grebes with at least one fluffy young on the nest being fed by a visiting parent while the other brooded, nesting Magpie Lark, nesting Little Pied Cormorants and Darters sharing the same tree… and:

Tree Martin Petrochelidon nigricans 
 
“There’s always someone pushing their way to the front…”  –>

“I’m getting squashed!”

“I can’t see back here!”

“See? Look what happens when Dad brings lunch…”

“Unfortunately there’s always someone wanting to evict us too… Not enough housing (ask anyone trying to rent around the metro area)…”

Yesterday, I took an old friend to explore the Len Howard Conservation Area in Erskine, Mandurah, just outside my door. After a morning birding and walking, we ended up here, where there is now an upscale marina, hotel and fancy houses. Sixty years ago when I was a young girl, it was just The Sticks area, devoid of buildings, called that because of the remains of poles stuck in the water to mark the channel. Anyway, we sat down on a park bench to eat our sandwiches. 

This was the calm scene in front of us at the time:

Peel inlet, The Sticks

A  few pelicans in the distance on the water, the odd seagull or tern or cormorant flying past. A water-logged darter climbed up from the water to the beach and hence onto that structure on the left, so bedraggled that his soaked tail swept the ground like a street sweeper’s wet broom. He then hung out his wings and tail feathers to dry…


As always for beachside picnics, a family of magpies, a raven and several gulls grouped around eyeing us hungrily as we ate our sandwiches.

Male Magpie

Female Magpie

 

Birds everywhere. Everywhere we looked. Pelicans, several species of cormorant, darters, several species of terns, gulls…

All those white bits in the water are cormorant necks!

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Gradually they began to disperse:

Until finally, they had mostly disappeared, almost as quickly as they had arrived:

A few gulls remained for a while — disappointed I suspect, as being unable to dive, they had missed out on most of the feasting — until they too flew off:

And then we were alone again. But it was ten minutes of pure magic…

…this past week, finishing the final* (I hope) major re-write of Stormlord’s Exile, husband was off having fun on Sipadan Island, off Borneo, where the world’s best diving is to be found. Of course, he calls such perambulations work. Hmph.

Weather was stormy and after one stormy night a rather tired bird decided to take a nap on the beach…

Note his rather bedraggled appearance.

A bird with the (to a non-birder) rather unlikely name Brown Booby.
But then, don’t you think it kinda suits the bird?
All’s well that end’s well – here, with the dawn, it is on its way out to sea again .

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*hah. I should say final- until the editors get hold of it!

Good birding trips have very early starts. Geez, the sun gets up early in Qld…And include different habitats…

Including some that look familiar in this case. This photo could so have been taken in Malaysia…

It was great to be in a place where the infrastructure is well looked after. We visited Mary Cairncross Scenic Reserve, and several parts of Brisbane Park, plus odd stops to look at roadside ponds and fields etc around Nambour where we stayed the night.

And there’s always someone who is looking the other way when a good bird drops by…

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Above: Walking on the beach near the family time share on the Gold Coast

Above: catching up with friends – breakfast along the river in Brisbane after the Aurealis Awards
(From left: Karen, Donna, Trudi and self.)

Above: Catching up with some other old acquaintances…

And looking for new ones –
the habitat of the Grass Owl we saw just before we left for home.
Ok, some of you may think that standing in the dark being eaten alive by clouds of mosquitoes isn’t fun, but all that tells me is that you aren’t a birder…
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Kota Belud is a town just to the north of Kota Kinabalu, Sabah. It is chiefly famous for its Sunday market, but the area is also supposed to be a bird sanctuary because of its extensive wetlands and ricefields, a favoured stopover for migratory waterbirds.

We went birdwatching there just before we returned to Kuala Lumpur.

Questioning locals about birds got us nowhere. The only birds they could think of were the ostriches in a nearby ostrich farm. So we set off to explore the area ourselves.

Scenery – brilliant. Birds, all over the place. Egrets, snipe, herons, sandpipers, duck, grassbirds, pipits, wagtails – I could have spent days there just poking around.

But a bird sanctuary? Well, forget the sanctuary bit.

Along the main road, there was a licensed stall selling wild birds stuck in impossibly small cages, including fledgling hill mynas obviously taken from the nest and as yet unable to feed themselves, shamas, doves, hanging parrots, even a young barbet. Horrible, quite, quite horrible.

I am always tempted when I see such places to buy everything and let them go. I never do, because in the end that just encourages the trade, and a conservationist has to put the greater good of the species before the individual animal. But it hurts. It hurts for days. And were these folk locals, doing what they have done for generations? Nope. They were from Malacca.

We stopped to watch some farmers harvesting rice. The harvester circled around the padi field, making an island of the ripened rice in the middle of the field. A couple of boys, the oldest about twelve, ran around the edges of the newly cut crop with a dog. At first we thought they were playing. They certainly seem to be enjoying themselves, but it was hard to see what they were up to, as we were a long way off. And then we realised: they were catching what looked to be Slatey-breasted Rails. (That’s a bird, you non-birders out there, a type of ‘ruak’, waterhen-like, the size of a bantam hen.) These birds can fly, but their preferred desire to run and hide betrays them. The boys and the dog were too quick.

Soon, as the expanse of standing crop was reduced down the size of a tennis court, the boys each had five or six birds dangling by their legs – some obviously still alive. The boys contribution to the family dinner.

Does it worry me? Not as much as the caged birds for sale, not by a long shot. But yes, it does, even so. There are rare crakes and rails as well as common ones. These farmers don’t know the difference. They should. There should be laws to obey: “you can take this species, but not that one” or “you can take so many per family member and no more” and so on.

What worked as sustainable harvesting 100 years ago doesn’t work any more, what with a population growth that is totally out of control. Uncontrolled harvesting of wildlife is detrimental to the species as well as the farmer (for insect control as well as for future dinners). Everything has to be sustainable.

A bird sanctuary indeed. We Malaysians have a lot to learn about compassion for animals – even the ones we eat – about sustainability, conservation and environmental impact. Unless we learn these lessons, then we are dooming ourselves to an impoverished future, both for humans and for our biodiversity.

And don’t talk to me about education and waiting for the present day youngsters to grow up with different attitudes. We are running out of time.

Remember – we wanted to find the Bornean Peacock-Pheasant.

Seems we went to the wrong place. The area where the last one anyone has ever seen in North Borneo was shot in 1996 (by the Sabah Museum) has the same name as the area around Imbak.

But there is another area with that name – seems we went to the wrong one. Next time.

At Imbak, though, we did hear a report about lots of Black Partridges, another very rarely seen rare bird… hmmm

Anyway, here are some more pix from Imbak:
Dennis and I birding in the mist early morning.
The last pix is me writing in camp at night.
The river views are behind where I was writing (remember, these buildings have no walls, which is fantastic. You feel you are living in the middle of the rainforest.)