Help please to identify Australian birds
 

Hi, all.

While touring around in July / August 2011 we saw many birds. Lots of them I was able to identify or was told what they were. These poor little (and not so little) birds have got me beat! Is anyone able to help me identify them, please? Some of the photos are a little blurry because they were taken from quite a distance using either a 17 - 85mm lens or 55 - 250mm lens.
Thanks so much.
Dot

Here is the link - hopefully!
http://www.worldisround.com/articles/369799/index.html

1 yes
2 Red-tailed Black Cockatoo
3 Australian Pratincole
4 Pied Butcherbird, immature see 14
5 Little Egret
6 Black Kite
7 Whistling Kite
8 Forest Kingfisher
9 Friarbird, immature mostly likely Helmeted
10 & 11 Great Bowerbird and what happened in picture 10 is that the camera focused on the background. When shooting wildlife set your camera to spot focus rather than a generalised one.
12 Kites
13 Yes
14 Pied Butcherdird, adult, see 4
15 Grey-headed and White Plumed Honeyeaters
16 Brown Honeyeater
17 yes
18 Grey Shrikethrush

Hope this is helpful. As mentioned above, use your camera manual to set your camera to central spot focus. If you want to focus on something which is not in the middle of the screen it is likely that you'll not be in a hurry so can take the first pressure on your shutter button to set the focus and while holding that still, frame the picture you want.

The wet has just started up here. Cool nights warm mornings and a storm in the afternoon.

Thank you so much, Alan. :) I knew someone would come through. Now I can finish labelling all my 1200+ photos from our trip! Back at school from about Wednesday next week so I'd better get on with it.

By the way, I enjoyed the link to Atherton Tablelands that you shared with Toucan (I think it was). It brought back memories of our meanders around the Tablelands some years ago.

Hope you all make it safely through the wet this year, and no repeats of last year.

Dot

You're welcome Dot. Glad it brought back memories.

For other fodorites who visit Aus you are welcome to send me pictures you want identified but I may not get to them this quickly nor finish them if there are heaps which keep sending me to the reference books.

Hi Dot

Notice on your Darwin report you have a couple of unlabelled pics of plants. The Flower at Aquascene is a Shell Ginger, a large plant which takes over if you let it, and the white flower is a Spider Lily. Both hardy and also grow all over Cairns area, Spider Lily used extensively in council street planting.

Pat, thank you for that. Again, I don't always know the names of plants, or where to start looking for them by genus.

I don't remember seeing either when in Cairns, but we were Cairns in the September holidays and Darwin in July. I must amend my photos now.

Dot

Alan, I'm so impressed with both your knowledge and helpfulness. My favourite Christmas present was a bird identification book, and it's amazed me just how many different birds there are in our leafy Melbourne backyard. You inspired me to start a journal and I'm so enjoying this insight into native fauna, just in my own garden!

Libretto, what a great result! What do you record? Is it just the presence and by inference absence of the birds and at what sort of frequency? Or do you get more technical and record when they turn up and leave each year, breeding effort etc.?

Lots of interesting places to go birding around Melbourne area. Australia's two largest bird watching and research organisations have just merged to form BirdLife Australia http://www.birdlife.org.au/

Led by Pat's reference to Dot's other pictures I've had a look at those too and have a few more things for you Dot. There are lots of ways to make your pictures smaller but I'll leave that to some one a bit more skilled than me to help you with. I am much better with living things (or once living things) than these damn machines.

Katherine and Nitmulik
Bats are Little Red Flying Fox
Kingfisher at Sugarbag Cafe is a blue-winged Kookaburra

Litchfield to Katherine
Bird at Goymarr is a Little Friarbird

Mataranka to Daly Waters
Unknown bird and Plant D W bird is Brown Honeyeater and the plant is a new hybrid of a well known weed the name of which escapes me at the moment. However you will notice that this new form does not set seed. We have too many invasive species in this country and it is great to see more responsible gardening.

Darwin
The fish look like mullet but while I can name a couple of species they are not I don't think I can ID them and I've given away my fish books.
Your marsupial 'rhino' is a Diprotodon optatum but the skull seems too long for its depth. I have only seen a few specimens and they apparently varied considerably through sexual dimorphism.
The stuffed snake is an Arafura File-snake. It is paler than any I have seen but this may be an artifact of its preservation

Hi Alan, at the moment I'm just started recording all the birds I see (identification book in hand if necessary) once in the morning and then again at dusk.

We've long had a bird bath and I've loved seeing the birds gather, but was totally engaged a couple of years ago by a nesting pair of tawny Frogmouths- two nestlings raised and they are there again!

I'm hoping over time to notice more aspects like the time of year birds arrive etc.
At the ripe old age of 62 I've realised that I did absorb a bit from all those Gould League Bird Lover's pamphlets handed out in our 1950's - 60's classrooms.

It's just a delight all round - as I'm writing this a flock of VERY noisy lorikeets are squawking and acting like larrikins in my neighbour's flowering gumtree......

thanks Alan, the freshly built sunbird nest I mentioned a while ago has never been used,same with neighbour who tried to deter butcher birds with mirrors and rubber fake snakes. Probably just helped to scare the sunbirds away. Am nearly positive they are butcher birds, black, about the size of a currawong with a bit of a hook on end of grey beak. and getting very bold, sometimes walking into house as if they own it. There's a young one, sort of brown grey/ cream plumage, he sits on the edge of a tank outside I keep waterlilies and guppies in, guppies to eat mozzie larva, and he's had a lovely time today eating the guppies.

Oops! I knew it was a kookaburra at Sugarbag Cafe, Nitmulik, so I don't know what I was thinking of when I wrote 'kingfisher'. Thank you for spotting my mistake, Alan. How embarrassing.
And thanks for identifying the Nitmulik 'bats'. I never know which is which. We have native bats here - saw some quite interesting specimens on TV the other night - which are definitely bats and, to the untrained eye, they look the same as those we saw in Nitmulik and Kakadu except for the colour!
Also the bird at Daly Waters. I hadn't expected it to be identified as there didn't seem to be enough visible. (At present I am working on my notebook as my main computer keeps crashing, and the notebook screen is only 22cm wide and 13.5cm high! I do zoom in where possible to check a finer point but obviously need to do that more regularly.)
I must go into the camera shop from which I bought my camera last April to find out how to reduce the size once taken. I have tried to reduce them but they only go down 1%!

Thanks again for the help.

Dot

Dot, a Blue-winged Kookaburra is a kingfisher so it is no mistake at all. [All kookaburras are kingfishers but not all kingfishers are kookaburras] Sometimes when it comes to ID it is not so much how much is showing but which parts. A clear view of a bird taken at an unusual angle with non of the key features showing can be very difficult to ID.

Pat, That description sounds very much like Black Butcherbird. As the butcherbirds will not be really interested until the young have started to develop and at that stage the sunbirds will be very site loyal (loyal parents might be a better term) that would be the time to hang protection. i.e. put up two hanging pot wire frames or something else which the sunbirds can get through but the butcherbirds cannot.

Libretto, those records will be of interest once you build up a lengthy data set and BirdLife Australia would probably host them for you.

For those who who are prepared to pay the $32 there is an iphone, ipad, ipod App called
The Michael Morcombe eGuide to the Birds of Australia
By mydigitalearth.com on iTunes at
http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/the-m...397979505?mt=8

I like the feature that allows you to play the bird call.

This is quite a good guide but if you are not coming to Australia in the next few months then I suggest that you hold off as a couple more are due for release.