Yuraygir National Park- week 2 birdwatching field trip

In Search of the Elusive Jabiru

Field trip day today- we headed off in search of Australia's only stork.
The jabiru is also known as the black necked stork, stands at 110 - 130 cm tall and has glorious long red legs- shouldn't be too hard to spot.
I have seen them over the back fence in wet winters and springs.

We headed out to some wetlands on private land to start.
We had the journals, field guide, art materials, binoculars, camera and food all set up in the back, so we just pulled over anywhere and had our school room all set up. I even had little cups of mixed up watercolours pegged together inside a sturdy bag so they didn't spill.


We saw majestic black swans nesting,


whistling kites, brahminy kites, pelicans, cattle egrets, lorikeets- scaly breasted and rainbows, a variety of honey eaters,a great egret and a blue heron- but sadly no jabirus- I know they do nest here but there were none today.


This beautiful spot is someones paddock!

Next we headed out to Yuraygir

Our first stop was Lake Aragon


It was early afternoon, sadly no water birds but the surrounding bushland was filled with chirpy little fellows, unfortunately so was our bird watching party so we didn't get close enough to any to identify any new ones.

Next stop was Red Cliff and we noticed these 2 familiar little birds-
Kez thinks they might be following us!

There are ground parrots in this area alas it was not the best time of day to see them, we did see a lot of kangaroos right on "the edge of Australia' as Mr6 put it. Once the boys saw the ocean they were pretty keen get into it so we headed to Brooms Head .


I set up our school space in a nice shady spot and the boys headed in for a swim- that is them entering the water above. They had wonderful time splashing and swimming and were joined by some camera shy dolphins.

There were lots of shore birds here and we found all sorts of feathers and footprints in the sand. We had afternoon tea and worked in our journals but we still hadn't seen that elusive jabiru and we had one more place to try.

Sandon Point-
we had a majestic Osprey flying above our car for a while as we drove there and we all took that as a blessing. The boys got to have a really good look at it as it was so low and watch it flying. They were noticing details in its feathers and feet, it was that close.

Mr10 almost jumped out of the car when he spotted our much searched for jabiru- and it was that moment when I realised how handy a telephoto lens on my camera would be in our bird study unit.


We found our elusive Jabiru


And right near our jabiru was this tree-
I am a total tree lover and this old hollowed out mangrove is so stunning.


and look who else was here-

On the way home we were escorted by another osprey- so exciting! The boys are super keen to get to the raptors week now. We were driving home through a beautiful sunset, the sky was purple, magenta and gold.


We also passed through Lawrence where we had looked at the Egret Rookery on the weekend- there were many more birds, it was late afternoon and they were all coming home to roost.


We also watched the full golden moon rise- huge on the horizon
a perfect finale on a perfect day.