Herring Island

Fourteen brave birders boarded the HMAS Parks Victoria for this morning’s visit to Herring Island! There were so many of us, in fact, that it took three trips to get us all across.

The day started strong, with dozens of little black cormorants spread across the landing and feeding in the water, as well as silver gull, one little pied cormorant, masked lapwing, dusky moorhen, Pacific black duck and Eurasian coot. Claire K and Emma B arrived early and did the hard work of counting all these birds of us – thank you very much. Most excitingly for me, two black swans that had been sitting on the Stonnington side of the river drifted across to the Yarra side.

As we were assembling on the island we had two brown thornbills and three silvereye in the casuarina, I think the only observations of these all morning, as well as a spotted dove, immature common starling and a common blackbird. Archer C and Aidan P may have had a spotted pardalote, but it remains a year need for poor old Gary.

On the main lawn area there was a common myna and a superb fairywren hopping around. After championing our beautiful native pigeons to Mandy only a few minutes earlier, it was great when a crested pigeon arrived and flicked its tail up.

Further down the path toward the gallery on the eastern edge we had a few parrot flyovers: our first red-rumped parrot and rainbow lorikeet, and the only musk lorikeet of the day.

A possible pelican flyover turned out to be a plane – damn.

From here, along the northern edge we had welcome swallows, white-plumed honeyeater, red wattlebird, big Yarra rare Australasian swamphen, our first chestnut teal and more starlings, fairywren and miners.

We paused along here and about half the group heard an Australian reed warbler. Jess very kindly saved me from a spider that was about to paralyse me and drag me away (probably).

At the northernmost point of the island we had rock doves, and both Emma and Tessa saw a large white bird flying upriver that gave the impression of a pied cormorant, though neither got their bins onto it quickly enough to confirm.

Here we had the highlight of the day: I spotted a great crested grebe back upriver toward Como Landing in a small flock of chestnut teals. It started firmly on the Stonnington side of the river, but after only a few minutes of sitting and watching it slowly made its way down to us before surfacing right at the island’s edge.

This was the first ever record of a great crested grebe for both Yarra and Stonnington – very exciting!!!

We didn’t add anything new as we looped back to the punt, but did find more coots, rainbow lorikeets, doves, fairywren. The island was buzzing today – full of people and full of birds, we ended up with 30 species.