2506 Loddon
I finished my marking earlier than expected and so, not having to attend the classroom on Monday, I treated myself to a night away in Wedderburn.
I’d never been to Mount Korong before but I’ve heard people praise it and, even better, there has been an incredibly rare for Victoria bar-shouldered dove present there for a few months and I figured it was worth trying to twitch it! There are another few potential targets for me here too: white-backed swallow and white-bellied cuckooshrike have been seen within the past week, and banded lapwings are in the general area. Mount Korong is also known for being a reliable spot for painted honeyeaters but they don’t typically arrive until mid-September.
Sunday 1 June
Mount Korong
I arrived at Mount Korong for the first time at around 15.00 after briefly stopping when a large white shape on a farm dam caught my eye: a yellow-billed spoonbill, next to which were two Australian shelducks, masked lapwings, dusky woodswallow and starlings, red-rumped parrots and magpie.
The suggestion on the dove was that it is calling around sunrise but is rarely found later in the day, apparently because it is very quiet. With that in mind I had almost no expectation of finding it on this first trip but having never been here before, and knowing it is a very large reserve, I wanted to scope out the eastern side of the slope so that I was familiar when arriving early the following morning.
I parked my car at the campground, ate a salad roll that I brought with me from Abbotsford (thank you Kelso’s), which I did not share with a willie wagtail that was quite keen, then walked out to the eastern portion of the Mount Korong Firebreak Track. There were plenty of galah, corella, and superb fairywren around (though I didn’t find any purple-backed fairywren, also present here). The place was absolutely teeming with honeyeaters: I had red wattlebirds, yellow-tufted, and white-plumed immediately, as well as two black-chinned honeyeaters flying around up near the summit. I don’t know if this is a real thing, but I also saw a lot of spiny-cheeked on singing aggression across the whole trip. New head canon is these two species are rivals for the prettiest honeyeater calls and they fight bitterly over it.
There was plenty of chatter but, as expected, not from any doves. I did hear grey shrikethrush, weebill, golden whistler, Australian raven and both spotted and striated pardalote. The chattiest birds might have been four wedge-tailed eagles circling over the reserve. I’ll never get tired of watching them.
I briefly met Pat R too, who had a similar idea to me and was stopping in hoping to find the dove on his way back through to Melbourne. eBird tells me he wasn’t successful, but he did give me a tip on southern scrub-robin which I’ll be taking up next time I’m in the area.
After about 90 minutes here I went to my accommodation in Wedderburn. Surprisingly in town I picked up a few more things: both musk and rainbow lorikeets, welcome swallow, silvereye, common blackbird. All of these I also found at other sites but they were firsts for the trip at least.
Monday 2 June
Sunrise was late (7.30) and so I was able to grab a coffee in town before heading over. Being more familiar with the site now I parked much further up along the track, next to the southern quarry – two sites on the adjacent private property which were useful reference points for the dove’s movements.
Mount Korong
Once again the galahs, corellas and sulphur-crested cockatoos were incredibly chatty, the honeyeaters were abundant, but I was single-minded about finding my target.
Surprisingly (and happily), that was quite easy. I heard the peaceful doves calling first, from a few different directions, but I set off toward the northern quarry as half a dozen people had reported seeing it in this area, and only a few in the southern portion.
I heard a couple of bar-shouldered dove calls while walking approximately 100m along the track. At first it sounded like it was in an adjacent paddock, so I spent about ten minutes scanning the grasses here – finding magpies and a couple of mating masked lapwing – but no pigeons of any sort.
Continuing north, along the roadside just a little further along from the northern quarry there was a fairly dense line of shrubs – I think casuarinas, maybe younger drooping sheoaks, with harlequin mistletoe growing through – but I know little about flora. Whatever it was, in here I had an unusually curious peaceful dove zip in at about knee-height. It sat on an old branch about 5 metres away for a minute before it was joined by three more birds.
Unbelievably, one of those birds was the famous bar-shouldered dove! It didn’t join the peaceful doves on that branch, but it sat nearby and watched me as I watched it. And what a beautiful bird to watch! I didn’t get any five-star photos, but certainly got enough to be happy. A lovely purple-grey head, throat and breast, pink-grey stomach, brown wings, and that absolutely gorgeous copper nape, with barring running down its crown, neck, shoulders and wings.
It was quite skittish and never really let me approach, but I also found that it was tending to stay within a 100m radius and frequently returned to where I was sitting by the road. It was calling very infrequently, but it did appear to be responding to my whistling imitation of its call – whether that was true or a something I’m trying to convince myself of I’m not totally sure, but it certainly felt like that in the moment. Any time I lost track of it, I would whistle and it would whistle back.
I looked it up later and they’re even more unusual in Victoria than I realised. I had the incorrect sense of them as a grassland or dry woodland species, more like a peaceful dove, and assumed that they’d be more common in the Loddon-Mallee and across the Murray into the Riverina. I was completely wrong on that: though there are populations around Griffith, Lake Cargelligo and Cobar, in New South Wales they’re overwhelmingly within and to the east of the Great Dividing Range, and they’re far more common along the tropic coasts of Queensland and the Northern Territory.
This individual is the first record of them anywhere in the northwest of Victoria. eBird only has four clusters of results anywhere in the state, which make a lot more sense given what I now know about their preferred habitat: a bird each in Orbost and Mallacoota in 2022, though months apart; a pair of birds in South Gippsland in 2023 which are almost certainly aviary escapees, and another at Coranderrk just outside Healesville, Yarra Ranges, in 1994, also recorded as an escapee.
I spent about half an hour trying to photograph this bird on-and-off, it would settle somewhere near me for about a minute in every ten. In the end, though it was curious about me, I never got a perfect shot. The only time it ventured out into the open, below, it had the sun directly behind it, it was on a very ugly perch with a mess of sticks in frame, and I had to move very slowly around to get a shot where it wasn’t obscured by a casuarina – not quite achieved, you can see the dark foreground blur in the bottom right corner.
Still, I’m very happy to have seen it – a lifer and a rare Victoria tick.
After finishing up with the dove, I kept going up the track, finding three of my favourite actual dry woodland Loddon Mallee specialty species along the way: both male and female Gilbert’s whistler, a female hooded robin, and two diamond firetails that I accidentally flushed from the grasses as I walked by. I also spotted a peregrine falcon flying along the cliff near the peak, a brown falcon perched in a tree, and two of the wedge-tailed eagles emerged for another day of making everything else uncomfortable.
At the northernmost end of my walk, where the track had a turnoff into somebody’s Land for Wildlife property, I went off road for a while to follow a few white-browed babbler. They were very wary and I couldn’t get photos, but that’s fine – I’m absolutely happy just to sit and watch these terrific little birds as they dig through the leaf litter, argue and tumble about. There were two groups of six here, keeping a bit of distance from each other and a lot of distance from me.
While watching them in this section I also found a male golden whistler, three southern whiteface, a few red-rumped parrot picking at seeds and heard two kookaburra calling from somewhere over the private fence.
From here I returned to the car and then made the mistake of continuing around the track instead of just turning around. It’s a very easy trail on the eastern edge but gets a bit harrowing on the western where you’ve got a lot more changes in your elevation. As somebody who is not a confident off-road driver and really hates heights I was very uncomfortable on this part of the track – I definitely wouldn’t want to do it in a 2WD.
I had a few more hits on my way through to Kangaroo Flat. A few kilometres south of where I’d stopped for the spoonbill the previous day a jacky winter sat on a farm fence and, behind that, around 80 maned ducks grazed in a paddock and on a small dam. Just after passing through Bridgewater, in a place Google Maps tells me is gazetted as Derby, I had a black-shouldered kite hovering over a field and then, shortly afterwards, a pied butcherbird swooped across the road in front of my car. Finally in Marong, where I pulled over briefly to eat lunch, I had my first noisy miner of the trip and my first and only purple-crowned lorikeets.
Crusoe Reservoir and No. 7 Park
On my way home I stopped at Crusoe Reservoir and No. 7 Park, a terrific reserve just outside of Bendigo. I didn’t find the time at all last year so it was my first trip since New Years’ Eve 2023.
What was going to be a quick break became a two hour, five kilometre walk around the reservoir and some of the parkland on the southern edge in particular.
On the water itself I added Pacific black duck, dusky moorhen, Eurasian coot, Australasian swamphen and hoary-headed grebe, as well as some more maned ducks. There was a group of seven great cormorants on the dam and with them was a pied cormorant – the first ever record at the site.
Starting from the carpark and moving in a counter-clockwise direction, I found crimson rosella, rufous whistler, more rainbow and musk lorikeets, a couple of grey currawong, and many flocks of white-winged choughs. Choughs are up there with my favourite birds. There’s a bit of a theme forming with my preferred birds being them, babblers, apostlebird… I like super social ground feeders, I think. The birds here were fairly unbothered by me and I was able to sit and watch one group in particular picking their way through the leaf litter for about five minutes.
Crusoe is perhaps best known among birders for its Australian owlet nightjars – a very photogenic nocturnal species that otherwise can be quite difficult to track down as they rest in tree hollows through the day. There are a few at Crusoe, and there are a couple of roosts that they seem to return to almost daily. This is still the only place I’ve ever seen one, and happily I got a much better look today as its chosen spot was quite open.
I’m not local enough to know all the spots so I didn’t find this one on my own – I was helped by an excellent photographer named Mal. He also let me know about the robins that had been seen in the area over recent weeks – scarlet, rose and, most oddly, a female flame robin, which I’d usually associate with scrubby grassland rather than the dense dry woods of Crusoe. I didn’t find any of these, though I did find a few striated thornbills, common bronzewing, a grey fantail and plenty of brown treecreepers.
The other star bird here in recent weeks was a restless flycatcher, which I wasn’t able to track down. I think I heard it in the south-east corner of the site, but I’m not confident enough to record it.
I did however find a few yellow-footed antechinus which were happy to creep up remarkably close to me, a single echidna, and a couple of eastern grey kangaroo. I’m not a mammal guy in the same way that I’m not a flora guy, but I would like to change that and learn more about them.
A great trip overall then. I found my main target, the bar-shouldered dove, and I got nice photos of Australian owlet-nightjar, white-winged chough, brown treecreeper and grey currawong.
I missed all of my secondary targets – white-bellied cuckooshrike, white-backed swallow, banded lapwing – but I also didn’t try particularly hard for any of them. My biggest overall dips were yellow-rumped thornbill, tree martin, and both brown-headed and white-eared honeyeaters.
