Warby-Ovens NP

After getting rained out of a planned trip around the Warby-Ovens National Park this coming weekend, Jonathan T and I took the opportunity of a day off, a rare bird and a clear day for a day trip to north central Victoria.

Morey Rd

This small dirt track adjacent to the airfield has been a popular stop this week due to the ongoing presence of an Australian bustard among the cows.

Though not unheard of in Victoria, their range is limited and they’re far from a common species. Birds of the World¹ has them across the Wimmera, Mallee and Loddon regions in the west of the state, reflecting their preference for grassland, scrub and open woodland.

Actual observations are uncommon. Given their suitability to otherwise remote areas where they may escape observation, eBird’s data is undoubtedly lower than their actual abundance; nevertheless there are relatively few records of them in Victoria over the past decade. They appear to be most reliable in the southern end of Wyperfeld / Big Desert national parks, with sightings each year since 2015 except 2017 and 2019. These are mostly in the winter period, corresponding with their breeding period in this part of their range.

Within their range, over the past decade individual birds have also been recorded at Kaniva in 2015, Pyramid Hill in 2017 and at both Annuello and Murtoa in 2018.

Three or four birds have been recorded outside their range in this period. The first was outside Nathalia, near Numurkah in north central Victoria, in 2015. The second was just north of Warrnambool in Wangoom in 2018. The others were at Cosgrove just east of Shepparton on 7 May 2025, and this most recent and heavily twitched bird at Benalla, first reported to eBird on 22 May. It’s very possible that these two are the same bird.

We arrived at the western edge of Morey Road just outside Benalla at around 9.00. Immediately on pulling up we had a golden-headed cisticola buzzing at us from a gate and two superb fairywren similarly flitting about in the long grass beside the fenceline.

There was also a small brown bird perched up on the fenceline here that we watched get chased across the road and into the grass by an Australian magpie. Both Jono and I initially thought it was an Australasian pipit, though agreed that it was too small and too stocky and its call was not the descending chirp of a pipit but was a far more varied set of chips and trills. We were happy then to discover it was actually a singing bushlark, marked as a rare for the location and first observed by Josh G a couple of days earlier.

The star of the show here turned out to be quite easy to locate – probably not a surprise for a bird ‘half the size of an emu’. Jono saw the Australian bustard first on the far end of the southern paddock, grazing over near the Hume Highway.

In the half hour that we spent here it never got much closer than where we first spotted it, and my photos are all from far away. That said, I was quite happy just to watch this handsome bird pick at the ground without trying too hard for a good shot.

Glenrowan

After leaving Benalla we continued north toward the Warby-Ovens Ranges, stopping first in Glenrowan for a coffee. Upon parking the car Jono immediately identified a flycatcher call, and it turned out to be an incredibly obliging restless flycatcher. After dipping on finding one at Crusoe earlier this week I was quite pleased to spend a bit of time with this one, particularly as it seemed to want the attention – it would frequently return to where we were, even after being chased off by a willie wagtail.

Also in town here we found house sparrow, common starling, common blackbird, white-plumed honeyeater and red wattlebird, as well as (and very importantly) a latte for me and a cappuccino for Jono.

Our main reason for heading to Warby-Ovens National Park was in search of turquoise parrots, a potential lifer for Jono and a bird I’m still missing a decent photo of. Nason Track / Gap Track were our best chance for them, but I’ve also seen them along Warby Range Road at Hamilton Park, a small town(?) / suburb (?) / development (?) a couple of minutes north of Glenrowan. My other goal here was double-barred finch, a bird I’ve seen in New South Wales but still not in Victoria.

We stopped at Orchard Drive and walked about 400m along the path here. On a power pole directly above where I parked two striated pardalote were calling, and the local white-plumed honeyeaters were bullying absolutely everything in sight.

To the south, back toward Glenrowan, a whistling kite circled overhead.

We didn’t find turqs or the swift parrots that have been reported along here recently but did have red-rumped parrot, sulphur-crested cockatoo and galah. We also couldn’t find any finch on Orchard, but there were superb fairywren and a grey fantail. Along Warby Range road there were crested pigeon, about a dozen maned duck in somebody’s front yard, and more willie wagtails on almost every fence post.

Gap Track

We only spent 15 minutes at Hamilton Park before continuing north up Warby Range Road and then west along Taminick Gap Road. We initially parked on Nason Track, intending to head down that trail, but almost immediately on getting out of the car we heard turquoise parrots calling somewhere along the ridge to the south and changed our plan.

Gap Track follows the fence line of an adjacent paddock and gives a good view onto a fairly long, low, predominantly north and east-facing granite ridge. The open woodland here has multiple species of eucalyptus, including a couple of very large yellow box (eucalyptus melliodora, one with a huge amount of mistletoe within it), as well as grey box (eucalyptus microcarba), and white box (eucalyptus albens). This is perfect habitat for turquoise parrots, and I’ve regularly had success with finding them here.

Turqs were once common across in north-eastern Victoria and in the foothills of the Great Dividing Range, however, widespead land clearing led to them being presumed extinct in the state in the early 20th century.² The species survived and reemerged in ecotones between agricultural areas and woodland. Warby-Ovens NP, Chiltern-Mt Pilot NP, and the upper Ovens River valley are home to some of the most significant remaining colonies in Victoria, with occasional vagrants appearing as far west as Little Desert NP, Mount Korong NCR and Greater Bendigo NP.

They’re a small parrot (20-22cm), green, and ground feeders, so you’d expect them to be difficult to locate in the long grass, but flocks here were super vocal and giving their very recognisable glassy neophema ‘tsee’ calls. In addition, the bright blue faces on the males particularly really made them stand out.

It wasn’t hard to locate them, but photographing them was a different story. They tended to remain in the grass, rarely emerging onto a perch and preferring to waddle away if we got too close for comfort. We had a lot of opportunities but I think both of us came away disappointed with the photographs that we did manage to achieve. My best shot – below – was taken from probably 10m away, with a lot of foreground obstruction and both harsh highlights and haze from the warm, clear day. It’s better than I’ve achieved for this species but still not as crisp or composed as I’m chasing.

We spent about half an hour in this spot, most of that time moving very slowly along the ground. While here we also had quite a few eastern rosellas and red-rumped parrots, Australian magpies, white-plumed honeyeaters and superb fairywrens. A male hooded robin briefly visited and a white-throated treecreeper called from somewhere further up the ridge. White-plumed honeyeaters here chased off a kookaburra.

When we moved on we continued along the fence, finding jacky winters on the posts (of course), magpies, more red-rumped parrots and peaceful doves calling in all directions. At the south-east corner we found seven flame robins, mostly males, grazing in the field.

We turned up toward the south and climbed the hill, finding a brown treecreeper, grey shrikethrush and two European goldfinch up in a casuarina. Both female and male scarlet were foraging in this section, perching low and then pouncing down onto insects on the ground. Over the next hill we could hear a wedge-tailed eagle’s flight calls, though we never saw it.

The most interesting thing to happen in this section were a pair of diamond firetails that Jono noticed in the long grass. One of them we observed carrying a stem from perch to perch, until it eventually settled directly above us. Diamond firetails don’t breed in June-July, but it nevertheless looked to me like he was practicing its courtship dance, holding the grass, stretching upwards, skirting along the branch and bobbing up and down.

If that was his goal, he was unsuccessful at attracting any attention from a female, though did get chased off by yet another aggressive white-plumed honeyeater.

The track here enters a small (~100m) patch of denser woodland where it runs between two peaks and down into the next small valley – which is fenced off as a private paddock.

In here there was another scarlet robin, I found a weebill and Jono found a mistletoebird. A grey fantail called from somewhere off to the west but we didn’t find it. We paused here for probably ten minutes, hoping for more, but it was only when we turned to leave that the faintest little high-pitched chip revealed a small mixed flock of thornbills coming down the eastern hill towards us. Striated thornbill were the dominant species, but by carefully checking we also found both buff-rumped and yellow within the group.

Nine pelicans flew overhead, presumably heading toward Winton Wetland just a few km to the west.

We turned back at this point, and Jono joked that the only major target for the day that we hadn’t managed to find was a speckled warbler – something I had mentioned I see pretty much every time I am here in this location. Well no sooner said than seen: a small, streaked bird in the canopy above us made its presence immediately known by singing as it moved from tree to tree.

That was more or less it for this stop and for the trip. We circled back toward the car, seeing another few turquoise parrots on the walk. A falcon sat perched in a dead tree down by Taminick Gap Road – a brown, not a black as we’d been hoping – and we saw hooded robin again, both male and female this time, initially mixed in with the jacky winters and flame robins before they zipped up into the woods.

Back at the car we had a bite to eat and finalised the checklist. Two crimson rosellas flew past, a late addition to the list, and I had two phantom calls that we weren’t confident enough on to note.

The first was dusky woodswallow, which is typically a common presence here but as I thought I heard its flight call but couldn’t see any overhead we decided not to record it – if it was present and calling it should have been visible.

The second was a far less common bird – so much so that we were halfway back to Melbourne before I realised what I thought it might be. It was a very flat, low, grating squawk, which in the field I likened to a regent parrot and (for some reason) declared that it sounded most like a cockatiel. We didn’t record that, of course – though they have arrived this far east in the past it’s incredibly unusual, and it’s way out of season for them. And it’s lucky that we didn’t, because when we were heading back it hit me that it was actually a superb parrot, a call I heard plenty of when I was in Numurkah in April.

We looked it up and there are very few superb parrot observations in the area – a single Charles Silveira record from the northern part of the range in 1984, in which he notes that the ranger has seen them on several occasions in the area. A bird was photographed at Tarrawingee on the eastern side of Wangaratta in 2019. A Victorian Government biodiversity plan for the Warby Ranges prepared in 2021 notes superb parrot as a ‘species of interest’ within the region.

They are seen to the north east, at Chiltern-Mount Pilot NP, with a bit more regularity – there have been half a dozen reports this year.

It’s very plausible to me that we did, in fact, hear a superb parrot while at Gap Track; but the fact that it’s so unusual and I didn’t identify it in the field means that I’m not comfortable recording it. (Seriously: how dumb do you have to be to jump from regent to cockatiel, a very different bird and call, rather than the almost identical squawk of the closely-related superb!). I do think it means another trip up in the near future to see if I can track it down though – or if somebody else does first, at least I’ll have this writeup as evidence of my failure as a birder.

On the trip back to Glenrowan for another coffee before the three-hour drive to Melbourne, we added magpie-lark, noisy miner and Australian king-parrot, ending the day with 52 species. The biggest dips were brown thornbill, most honeyeaters (but particularly New Holland, yellow-faced, yellow-tufted, eastern spinebill), satin bowerbird, white-winged chough, eastern yellow robin, red-browed finch.