Last night Claire K, Emma B, Lucy F, Jonathan T and I met at Fairfield Boathouse to try out some spotlighting along the river.

The sun was still setting when we met so while we still had some light we crossed the pipe bridge and wandered upriver toward the Chandler Highway. Almost immediately I stopped trying to count the dozens (?) of rainbow lorikeets that were calling in every direction.

From the bridge we could see dusky moorhen, silver gull and Pacific black ducks down on the water. From a few different directions we heard grey butcherbirds, welcome swallows hawked overhead, and Claire spotted our first tawny frogmouth of the night while it was still roosting. A few pied currawongs sat around and watched us menacingly. Emma found a common myna nest with a couple of young in it.

Once the sun was down we returned to the Yarra side of the river and started a slow walk toward the flying fox colony. A little corella flew overhead and out of sight. Butcherbirds and kookaburras were calling but most of the birds settled down pretty quickly. Two masked lapwing flew overhead screeching down by the eastern freeway.

We did hear the booming call of another tawny frogmouth, which we were able to quickly locate. We found maybe four of them in the end – it’s hard to keep track in the dark – and unsurprisingly they were the main bird of the evening. It’s nice to see them at night when they’re active, as compared to how we usually encounter them at roost.

There were also many grey-headed flying-foxes heading out – absolutely silent as they fly around and causing a lot of rustling as they landed in nearby trees.

We had plenty of white-striped free-tailed bats too: their calls were a constant companion and we were able to see a few of them zipping around in the twilight.

There was an interesting split in possums: brushtails between the freeway and the boathouse, ringtails in the flying-fox colony. We found four of the former and five of the latter.

As we were approaching the end we had a possible – distant, faint, not repeated – Australian boobook call coming out of Studley Park. We heard it a few times over about a ten minute period, but never quite got to 100 per cent confident, so didn’t record it. Something for our next spotlighting group this weekend to look forward to?

We didn’t see many species and couldn’t confirm any owls, but it was quite a lovely evening regardless! I thoroughly enjoyed having a quiet, slow walk through this part of the park.