Couple of glorious big birds of prey circling just off my verandah this arvo. Little Eagles, maybe? Was frantically running around with the binoculars and the bird id book, but couldn’t get a close enough look before they circled behind the trees again. You rarely see such big birds so low. Very cool
Little eagles are white/whitish, no? Leads to confusion with sea eagles I think.
They vary pretty widely in colouration from what my googling is telling me - pale sometimes, but never quite as white as a sea eagle (and a lot smaller too). I’ve never seen one in the flesh before, so I’m not really confident with my identification.
I went the other way. Saw a sea eagle which we get amongst the wedgies around Walkerville but saw a pic of a little eagle and thought maybe I’d seen one of those. Confident it was sea eagles and seen them many times since.
Ps most sea eagles I’ve seen was at lake Eildon, a long way from the sea!
Beautiful.
I’ve seen a pair of wedgies circling not far off the main road in Harkaway.
At least I assume it was a pair, definitely one wedgie, and some other raptor maybe 200m further away, and I don’t think they play nicely with other raptors.
Too treed over and suburban here in Mooza to get much.
Our most regular koala is doing it hard today in the heat, the only time you see her in low branches. And tomorrow’s going to be hotter. Time to put out shallow water bowls if you can. Possums and birds and all of sorts critters can use them.
if there’s any way you can spray water up into the tree, they can get extra water from licking the leaves and the trunk/branches
That tree is in the middle of a reserve out the back and out of range of our hose but we currently have tawnies in a tree in the back yard and they have dropped down too and have their beaks open. We’ve used the mist setting in the past to direct mist towards them but not directly at them and we’ll likely try that again tomorrow if they look distressed. We also have a ringtail nest in a bush on the fence line and we’ll pop a bowl near them. In my experience ringtails really struggle with extreme temperatures. We’ll also place a few bowls in the reserve near likely trees.
Yeah, ringies have a lot of trouble in hot weather.
Looks like I’ll be in the bat colony again tomorrow.
Remember to hydrate!
I’ve got 9 litres of water in the freezer, which will go into the esky with 8 bottles of gatorade. When DELWP ran the show they used to provide that sort of thing to volunteers, but Parks Victoria are kinda cheap on that front and we have to bring our own (but they’ve spent up big on installing misting sprinklers up high in the some of the nesting areas, so we’ll forgive them).
In the 2014 flying fox heat event i got through 22 bottles of water and gatorade a day - and that one went on for four days. And that’s not even counting what i drank when i got home afterwards.
Humble brag…
Can confirm they are two wedge tails. To my untrained eye anyway. One of them hovered real low out the back of our place the other day and feasted on its catch in the paddocks behind our place. Amazing to see.
A day or two later the pair came back through.
Bats had an ok day! I got called in at midday when it was starting to look very dicey, by the time i got to the colony at about 1:30 and the change had come through about 3 hours earlier than expected. There was a few babies we had to extract from the depths of a blackberry bush after they got themselves tangled and damaged their mouths trying to chew their way out, but compared to the appalling carnage we’ve seen in past years, it was almost a walk in the park.
So that was nice. I’ve got a load of spare gatorade now, mind you.
Still a bit worried about the Sale colony though, it’s going to be hot there for a lot longer.
And one Deadly mo.fo.
No1, isn’t it?
2nd deadliest on the planet
Maybe this should go in ‘What Annoys You’.
Were driving on a country road today when we came upon a rosella just standing on the road. We slowed right down while figuring out what was up with it. Clearly not right but clearly alive. It didn’t fly off, just stood there. There was nowhere for us to stop right there but just back was a spot. So we went on to look for a spot to u-turn. Just as we got back to the bird a car comes through at 100 clicks, didn’t slow and bang - dead bird. Some people!
Now maybe the bird was badly hurt and going to die anyway, but we’ll never know…