Ben Cruachan – natural history

Mike has asked us to write about why we bird, there are many reasons, and I’ll go into it a bit more in a future post, but one that cropped up today is the chance of seeing something special when least expected. An invitation led to a morning’s birding on a farm not far from the foothills, and we spent three hours walking through forty acres of bush beside the river. We gradually saw many of the expected species, but then my companions briefly saw a bird low down in the undergrowth, which had us guessing. The size was bigger than a scrub wren, but smaller than a grey thrush, its back had brown tonings, and there was a tiny bit of white on the wing. My suggestion was female Golden Whistler, the size and colour tallied, but we would have expected to see it higher up in the vegetation. We lost it and continued on, but then on the way back a movement caught our eye, and there was the bird low down again at the edge of some thick cover. Its back was to us at first, the brown tonings were plainly visible, and then it turned and gave us a frontal view of a bird we would never have expected to see in the area, an Olive Whistler. This is a bird that can be infuriatingly difficult to see, even where it normally occurs, and there we had one in a forty acre island of rough scrub surrounded by cleared grazing land. The river of course is a wildlife corridor, and the whistler had probably followed it down from the high country with the onset of winter, finding this little patch of remnant bush to its liking. A totally unexpected sighting, but one that shows just how important it is to retain as much of the remaining natural vegetation as possible, and if possible to add to it by revegetating suitable areas, a task my hosts are enthusiastically embracing.
When we arrived back at the vehicle we were greeted by a White-bellied Sea Eagle soaring over the river in the distance, and a flock of Flame Robins feeding on the grassy paddock, a great end to a memorable morning’s birding. Pictures of the Olive Whistler are not easy to find on the web, reflecting perhaps the difficulty of observing the bird, here
is the best I could find, on Tom Tarrant’s excellent Australasian Bird Image Database.