Osprey family

We'd never been to Yeppoon so the amount of development along that part of Queensland's coast was a bit of a surprise.

And so was this. The Ospreys are nesting on a tall lightpole at a marina and appear to have a family of two. We saw an adult take a large fish to the nest. Looking at the photos it appears that authorities have built some sort of platform on top of the lights.

You can't see me

Some of the bird books state that the Bush Stone-curlew can be seen around resorts in Queensland, when ordinarily it is a shy, nocturnal bird. I commented several weeks ago about a pair that we were shown in Airlie Beach township.

My son-in-law Adam, at Airlie Beach, has sent me a photo of some that he saw this week in the middle of the construction works associated with the new marina at Airlie Beach. He commented, "It was amazing - they were in the middle of our job site with people walking past them and no one noticed them, they just stood really still and they blended into the background." There are three in this photo.

Clouds

Before checking in to our accommodation at Charters Towers we drove to the highest spot in town so that we could see the sunset properly. I'd anticipated a good one because the clouds were spectacular. And we weren't disappointed.

The next day we drove north to Undara and I could hardly see the landscape for the show that was developing in the huge sky for all of the six hours we travelled. I'm lost for words to describe how beautiful the clouds were. [Where was Duncan when I needed him?]

Living wild in Queensland

Our last day in Queensland, where it's 25 degrees. Tomorrow we fly back to Geelong where it's 12 degrees. I'll have to remember to dig my jumper out from the bottom of my case and put it in my hand luggage.

This post is about some more of the fauna we've seen on our holiday. The Australian Bustard beside the road near Undara was very stately. It was lovely to see one again after a break of many years.

The Wonga Vine, one of the few plants flowering at Undara, attracted butterflies and moths.

This tiny caterpillar dropped on to the newspaper from overhead foliage as we were having a cuppa - a remarkable creature. And the Lace Monitor Varanus varius is resident in the picnic area at Finch Hatton Gorge. I googled him and he's mentioned in lots of blogs.

Fungi on Kingfisher Walk

Kingfisher Walk is a great name, and it's actually a great little walk in Conway forest near Airlie Beach. But, the kingfisher referred to is the Buff-breasted Paradise-kingfisher, a spectacular bird that only appears in this area in summer. Darn it. There were other interesting things to see on the walk, including fungi even though it's not really very wet at the moment.

Jewels

Happy residents of Airlie

About ten years ago I was a member of a team competing in a Challenge Bird Count. Our area was the Bellarine Peninsula near Geelong and our task was to find as many species of birds as we could in one day. Every year we went to the site of the old Mannerim School because 'once upon a time' it was the last reliable spot to find Bush Stone-curlews, but we never saw any. Except once. As we wandered into the schoolground a shout went up as two of the birds flew away from us and landed in a nearby paddock. We searched for them, without success of course because they are masters of camouflage. But we counted them in our total. And they haven't been seen on the peninsula since.
Well, tonight we went into the village of Airlie Beach in Queensland for dinner, and my daughter and her husband declared that could easily find me a Stone-curlew. And they did. We walked towards the yacht club and there they were on the lawn, two Bush Stone-curlews almost mingling with the people walking in the balmy night air.
I want to know why the birds in Airlie are so happy to live in an urban environment and those in Victoria took fright and disappeared.

Broken River

Eungella National Park in the Clarke Range north of Mackay in Queensland is well known in Australian birding circles because of a honeyeater. In 1983 Longmore and Boles published a description of a bird they named the Eungella Honeyeater. It's the last indigenous bird species found in Australia. (Although the page keeps getting changed. The Painted Snipe is a case in point - apparently our Painted Snipe is unique so it's now Australian Painted Snipe or something similar.)

Yesterday we went to Eungella but I didn't look for the honeyeater (I'd need a guide I reckon, although a friend of mine followed instructions that went something like "Look in the puddle at such and such GPS location" and found the bird immediately.) Instead, we went to Broken River to look for Platypus. And found one near the information centre. The pool in the river was big, and deep, and in shadow, but we waited patiently and eventually were able to watch the Platypus diving and coming to the surface regularly. The photos below aren't mine. My son-in-law Adam has a better zoom on his camera. If you look carefully at the first photo you can see the Platypus in the middle - that's what you have to look for.

We also saw several tortoises (species unknown) on a log and in the water. It's a beautiful place.

And as a bonus, on the way to Eungella I followed location details on the birding-aus mailing list to find the Cotton Pygmy-Goose on Deadmans Lagoon near Proserpine. A new species for me.

Tropical delights

We've walked on a lot of walks in the rain forests of north Queensland in the last couple of weeks. The forests are extremely beautiful and lush ... but dark. And most of the good stuff happens way up in the canopy, and at night. But these are a few of the things I noticed and was able to photograph.

I was totally fascinated by this tree. The flowers grow straight out of the trunk, even at ground level. It's called Bumpy Satinash Syzygium cormiflorum and is common in the rain forests of north Queensland. Apparently the fruit bats and possums find them a very attractive food source too.

And in this one too, the buds were growing from the lower trunk of a very tall tree.

These are the buttresses of the Red Tulip Oak.

And Tully claims to be the wettest town in Australia, hence the gum boot. It was so wet when we were there I took this photo from inside the car.

Views from a boardwalk

We've escaped from the cold, wet and windy weather in Geelong. Here in Airlie Beach it's sunny and over 20 degrees. This morning we walked the 5 km boardwalk along the beautiful foreshore, had an icecream (selecting from the 40 varieties available and choosing not to have a Freddo Frog or Smarties or snakes mashed into it), and caught the bus home because we were exhausted from having a good time.

This is a beautiful area, and the developers are having a field day. The mangroves are getting a hammering but I think most of what is left will survive because of the boardwalk. But then we get blokes like this, pictured below, who thinks it's OK to clear an area to pull the boat up into.

Right near the centre of town, between the man-made swimming lagoon and the man-made marina there is a stretch of mangroves and it is there that we saw an Australian Brush-turkey playing with a coconut, and a male Great Bowerbird tending to his bower in amongst the mangrove stems a metre from the path. All of his decorations were green.

And suspended from a branch of a eucalypt was this metre-long construction that I thought was a wasp nest but I'm out of my comfort zone here. I've really got no idea! Any suggestions?

The Captain saw glasshouses

Drive north from Brisbane and you can't avoid seeing the spectacular Glasshouse Mountains - with equally spectacular aboriginal names like Mt Tunbubudla and Mt Tibberoowuccum.

We have seen them from a distance several times, and have yet to get up close and personal. Captain Cook didn't get close either. He saw them as he sailed up the east coast in 1770 and named them - apparently he thought they resembled glasshouses.

They 13 mountains are actually the remnants of volcanoes about 25 million years old, the plugs of molten rock have been exposed as the surrounds eroded away. The first photo was taken from the airstrip at Caboolture (where we went to see the one and only Beaufort Torpedo Bomber left from WW2, currently being restored by volunteers) and the second photo was taken from a lookout on the Mt Mee road.