Only birdwatchers (and mad Englishmen) go out in the 43° midday sun! It was very hot in the Riverina for this tour - out on the desolate Hay Plains the temperature would have been higher than the official mark. The group of 14, plus crew Richard Jordan and Lene Janson, and guide Phil Maher, with help from a well stocked esky, managed to survive the hottest COG tour yet!
We joined Phil after lunch on Saturday for a visit to a remnant sandhill area where we saw Singing and Striped Honeyeaters, Red-capped Robins with young, White-winged Fairy-wrens, and White-backed Swallows overhead, then on to a small wetland where White-necked and White-faced Herons were breeding.
Highlights on the Hay Plains were hundreds of Banded Lapwings, some with young, numerous Brown Songlarks, Singing Bushlarks, a pair of Black Falcons, Australian Pratincole and a Tawny Frogmouth on the nest. Evening spotlighting brought a pair of Plains-wanderers (together for mating: they are usually solitary birds), another male, and several Little Button-quail, as well as Fat-tailed Dunnarts out looking for insects.
After such a long, hot day we were grateful that Robert, one of the property owners, quickly found the Plains-wanderers, after he had seen them in that area when moving sheep earlier. It meant we were (gratefully) back at our motel near midnight for a well earned sleep.
Next morning it was an early start for breakfast in the Gulpa State Forest, where the Superb Parrots with this year's young were wheeling around as we ate. Phil took us to a couple of places in the forest which have been fenced off from rabbits, where the callitris, buloke and wattles are regenerating and birds are returning.
Tullakool Saltworks was full of birds, including several species of sandpipers and plovers, Whiskered Terns, Red-necked Avocets and several Banded Stilts (a species we did not expect there). We had hoped for Freckled Duck at Kerang Lakes, but unfortunately found none amongst the thousands of Grey Teal and Australian Shelduck. The area, like the Riverina, has been in a dry spell while the country further north and south has had good rains, and many of the lakes were dry this year.
Our species list was down on the previous year due to the dry conditions and weather, but still a very good total at 148 species.
The tour was memorable for several things:
the male bonding - our group of 'single' males who got on so well and could usually be found at the nearest bar after a day in the field
'someone' who thought a dunnart was a bird, and was puzzled after being unable to find it listed in the Slater field guide
the U-shaped beds at the Commercial Hotel in Kerang, and Alison and Co taking over supervision of the kitchen to help speed up breakfast
the mass frenzy of map collecting at the Kerang Tourist Centre where we almost cleaned out the stocks
the great dinner at the Steampacket Hotel in Echuca, and
the amount of ice-creams and soft drinks consumed.
It is such a good short tour that we think we will put it on again in 1999, possibly a little earlier, in October or November, subject to a suitable date being available in the organisers' calendars.
A final disquieting note - this year we noticed a significant increase in the number of rice paddies taking over the land, in an area where evaporation must be very high in the summer growing season. We all asked the obvious questions: where is this water coming from, and what is being sacrificed elsewhere?
Jenny Bounds