dgraham@kean.ucs.mun.ca (David Graham) (10/31/90)
Well, our newsfeed is working again after mysteriously going dumb for a week. Managed to get out for a few hours on Sunday with a friend from here and a visiting birder from British Columbia. It was a wild and windy day, with temperatures hovering around 5 degrees Celsius and a strong north-easterly whipping the North Atlantic into a small frenzy. The sea was that steely colour it really only gets in the winter. What did we see? Not a great deal, but we had three late Gannets off Cape Spear (adults all by the look of them); a White-rumped Sandpiper feeding on the top of the cliff at Cape Spear (only the second for the B.C. birder, so he was happy); lots of Snow Buntings, but no longspurs :-(. Best bird of the day was a Greenland race White-fronted Goose at one of the local golf courses, where it's been hanging around the first tee drinking from puddles and grazing on the fairways... a lifer for me. We went to look for a dark-phase Gyrfalcon seen here briefly last week but it had moved on. A few Iceland Gulls have moved in, and a few Ring-bills are still hanging on, but the bulk of the gulls of Herring and Greater Black-backed, with a fairly large number of Common Black-headed around the harbour. It's that in-between time: the summer land birds have gone, and so have most of the breeding sea birds (Common Murre, Atlantic Puffin, Leach's Petrel, Northern Fulmar etc), while the winter sea birds (Dovekie, Thick-billed Murre, Common Eider, King Eider etc) have not really started to move in. No Purple Sandpipers yet either. Not that I'm longing for winter to strike, you understand... :-) *************************************************************************** David Graham dgraham@kean.ucs.mun.ca ***************************************************************************
andrewt@cs.su.oz (Andrew Taylor) (11/05/90)
Breeding activity is hitting its peak here.
I visited some open eucalypt woodland near Canberra on Saturday. Despite a late
(10am) start we saw tremendous bird activity in a mornings walk. Six species
{Noisy Friarbird, White-Winged Chough, Australian Magpie, Dusky Woodswallow,
Leaden Flycatcher, Brown treecreeper} on nests and I'm sure a bit of searching
would have found more. We saw Crimson & Eastern Rosellas checking out the same
tree hollow as a nesting site and territorial disputes between an assortment of
birds. Birds of the morning were a small flock of Little Lorikeets feeding
on eucalypt blossom.
Andrew