2504 Yellingbo NCA
Today we visited a new section of the Yellingbo Nature Conservation Area for me: Burrungma Biik, a 3.4 hectare site that was purchased and added to the reserve in 2017. The area was formerly part of a piggery and was mostly cleared land; it’s now subject to ongoing revegetation efforts by the Friends of the Helmeted Honeyeater, Yarra4Life and Parks Victoria.
This trip I was also very pleased to have Matt R along, a friend from New Zealand making his first trip over to Australia for birding. It was great to be able to bring Matt to Yellingbo and have him experience some of what makes it such a fantastic place. Also in the group were Peter, Alison, Brian, Karen, Taran, Robert and Bruce.
If there was a theme for the day, it would be that honeyeater migration is clearly underway. As soon as we arrived we had brown-headed honeyeater and New Holland honeyeater overhead, bell miner calling frequently, and we added noisy miner, red wattlebird, white-eared honeyeater, white-naped honeyeater and white-plumed honeyeater throughout the day. Wattlebirds were perhaps the most dominant species, which was unusual, and white-plumed is apparently exceptionally rare within the reserve. I’m so used to them being the primary non-miner honeyeater everywhere I go around Melbourne that I didn’t even think to call it out to the group but found out during the call that it was a rare observation. I felt bad for not drawing more attention to it!
Heading into the reserve we quickly had brown thornbills, grey fantails and the aforementioned red wattlebirds. We also had a tachyspiza raptor burst into that mixed flock. We didn’t get enough of a good look to identify it, nor see whether it got away with any breakfast, but it was a bit of early excitement. We also had two currawongs fly over at the same time – one grey, one pied – which helpfully distinguished themselves for us by both calling.
Superb fairywrens were a constant presence among the saplings, and a male eastern whipbird’s call was eventually joined by the female.
My task from Matt for the day was to find him some crimson rosellas. Happily (and unsurprisingly) they made this easy. Our first glimpse of them was at some distance, but they became a nearly constant presence as we made our way up along the trail.
Other parrots included a couple of eastern rosellas, a couple of Australian king-parrots, a sulphur-crested cockatoo and both little and long-billed corellas. The parrot highlight for me was a pair of yellow-tailed black cockatoos that flew in very slowly and low over our heads – “languid” was Robert’s perfect word to describe their flight – before they perched and we all observed each other for a good five minutes. These were the first two black cockatoos I’ve had this year and it was very nice to be back in their presence.
As we continued along the path we added more honeyeaters, flyovers from white-faced heron, Pacific black duck and little pied cormorant, lots of kookaburras and grey shrikethrush. Spotted pardalotes were more prevalent through the day but we did have a single instance of a striated pardalote calling. While we were standing and watching two king-parrots we had a dusky woodswallow flyover but they vanished as quickly as they arrived.
A farm dam at the end of our walk was very low – only a single Australasian grebe and three dusky moorhen were on it. Taran remarkably found an Eastern cattle-egret here too, an LGA tick for me and one that I rarely see.
We had a few mammals across the day: a swamp wallaby and two eastern grey kangaroos inside the reserve, as well as a sambal deer that Parks have been trying to remove for months and a fox on an adjacent property.
On the walk back we added six Australian wood ducks which were grazing in an adjacent field. We also were able to confirm that the raptor we had seen earlier in the day was a brown goshawk; it soared over us in more or less the same section.
During a 20 minute / 2ha survey at the end of the walk we added two new species for the day: a single red-browed finch landed near Bruce’s head, and Matt and I found two eastern shrike-tits intermixed with grey fantails, brown thornbills and a male golden whistler who finally gave us a good view.