Happy new year! May all your birding dreams come true – whether it’s ticking a Night Parrot in Australia, an Imperial Woodpecker in the USA, or a Great Auk in Europe. In the dying days of 2014, Imka and I planned three birding day-trips to try to push our year’s total to 175. Based on our…
I’m not a ‘Facebook person’, honest! I never post updates on my wall, my profile photo has remained unchanged for years, and I have a handful of ‘friends’. I am, however, an active member of the ‘Victorian Birders Facebook Group’, and I highly recommend joining (if you are a Victorian resident). The 300+ members regularly…
Now if you’ve been following this blog since its inception, then you know that we rarely ever find our target species. However, a recent twitch bucked that trend, and I am pleased to report that Swift Parrots are now on our life lists! To quote Colonel John ‘Hannibal’ Smith (from the 1980’s television series The A-Team),…
Sharing a special meal to celebrate good news is probably a universal cultural practice that pre-dates written history. So when we recently had some fantastic news in our lives, I decided to surprise Imka with a meal at one of Melbourne’s finest restaurants. Unbeknownst to her, ‘proximity to a decent birding location’ was a key selection criterion.…
Airport stopovers are such a waste of time, aren’t they? Even if you’re feeling adventurous, you usually can’t leave the airport because you’re probably very far away from the city-centre and don’t want to risk missing your connecting flight. So instead, you usually find yourself wandering the terminal like a mindless, window-shopping zombie, or, you try to…
Located just 30km north of Federation Square, Mill Park epitomises Melbourne’s rapid and unstoppable urban sprawl. Yet somehow, wetlands teeming with birds persist in an ever-encroaching sea of humanity. To get to the wetlands, take a left off Plenty Road on to McDonalds Road, passing the huge Westfield shopping complex on your left. McDonalds Road continues…
As a birder, you have no doubt felt the crushing disappointment of a ‘dip’: you read consecutive reports of sightings in the area, you psyched yourself up, you left home at an ungodly hour with a full tank of petrol, you drove 200km in terrible weather conditions, and not only were your target species elusive,…
In late spring, there was a flurry of Eremaea reports of a Powerful Owl family in the Wilson Reserve, and since we live just a 10 minute drive away from Ivanhoe, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to add a lifer to our list. The Wilson Reserve isn’t large compared to some of the national parks…
It never ceases to amaze us that forests teeming with wildlife still exist so close to Melbourne. Take the Warrandyte State Park for example: just 30 minutes drive from the CBD is an almost alien world (to city slickers) of crisp, unpolluted air, rich history, thick forests, a multitude of bird species, and even koalas! Based on…
Birding Lovers 