Atlas of Living Australia

The Atlas of Living Australia (Atlas) contains information on all the known species in Australia aggregated from a wide range of data providers: museums, herbaria, community groups, government departments, individuals and universities.

You might like to try us at 

http://biocache.ala.org.au/explore/your-area#-27.4618341|151.91984460000003|12|Birds

or put Franke Road, Highfields into the search engine.

Birds in the scrub

Leopard Ash in vibrant leaf

It was drizzling when I arrived at the Scrub and before I got out of the car there was a short, sharp shower. However this soon cleared away to a cool overcast and the birds came out to enjoy themselves. First of the day and a new one for my surveys was a pair of Red-rumped Parrots. They are ground feeders and one flew up from the paddock to sit in the trees of the Scrub. Once I was in the Scrub down near the dam I saw Spangled Drongo, Little Friarbird, Black-faced Cuckoo-shrike, an immature Olive-backed Oriole and Noisy Miners. There must have been a hatching of insects in the high canopy because all these birds were feeding, except the Noisy Miners, and there wasn’t any obvious blossom or fruit.

The Oriole is a good mimic and will often confuse you when you hear a variety of calls in the bush. This individual was practising its calls, a weird selection of squawks and trills which were nothing like its beautiful liquid “ori-ori-oriole”. It was being mobbed by Noisy Miners that chased it all over the Scrub but it remained in the area just moving from tree to tree. Perhaps the Oriole made a call that offended the Miners enough to harass it.

Where the Scrub opens out into the grassy bowl there were Striped Honeyeaters, a Rufous Fantail and Superb Fairy-wrens. Brown Honeyeaters were also searching for insects in the Sandalwood Santalum lanceolatum and Brown Thornbills in the Leopard Ash Flindersia collina. The Leopard Ash looked glorious in its washed-clean green finery.

Birds: Brown Quail (1 heard in the quarry area),  
Australian Wood Duck (2 in the trees of the Scrub), Spotted Dove (1 in the Scrub),
Crested Pigeon (1 on a fencepost), 
Little Black Cormorant (2 sitting on a wire going down into the dam), 
Galah (4 overhead), 
Pale-headed Rosella (5 in the flowering eucalypts),  
Red-rumped Parrot (2 in the paddock then 1 flew into Scrub), 
Eastern Koel (1 calling from nearby), 
Laughing Kookaburra (2 laughing in the Scrub), 
Dollarbird (1 sitting on a bare branch), 
Superb Fairy-wren (saw 1 but heard more), 
White-browed Scrubwren (3 following me through the Scrub), 
Yellow-rumped Thornbill (3 on the road), 
Brown Thornbill (2 in the Leopard Ash), 
Noisy Miner (4 chasing an Oriole), 
Brown Honeyeater (3 in the Sandalwood), 
Little Friarbird (1 feeding in the mid-high canopy), 
Striped Honeyeater (4 in the eucalypts), 
Black-faced Cuckoo-shrike (3 feeding in the mid-high canopy), 
Olive-backed Oriole (1immature practising its calls), 
Australian Magpie (2 carolling in the high branches), 
Spangled Drongo (1 feeding in the mid-high canopy), 
Rufous Fantail (1 low in some shrubs), 
Willie Wagtail (1 in the paddock), 
Torresian Crow (4 overhead), 
Magpie-lark (2 on the road verge), 
Golden-headed Cisticola (2 calling from the long grass), 
Silvereye (2 sweetly calling in the mid-canopy), 
Common Myna (5 in a dead sapling further north along Franke Rd), 
Mistletoebird (1 near the fence in the scrub on the Sheehan property).   
Butterflies: Orchard Swallowtail Papilio aegeus (1 flying through the Scrub).
Thank you Lesley for your contribution to our blog.

Conservation Volunteers in action

Last week we got some useful help from Conservation Volunteers Australia. This was organised through Dawn Heath and Alex Kennedy of the Adopt-a-Patch program. 

The volunteers were eight enthusiastic young people from Japan, Taiwan and France, with an English supervisor. It proved to be a challenging week for them, removing asparagus vine and cat's claw, and encountering some of our local wildlife in the form of a dead Burton's snake-lizard, a carpet snake and an eastern brown snake, as well as a large [possibly a wolf] spider.

Trish, George and Lee visited them during the week then Lee took them out to lunch. 

Their efforts will make a big difference to the scrub this summer.

The Adopt a Patch project is made possible through funding by the Australian Government's Caring for Our Country program.
Thank you George for the photos.

Spring is on the way

It was a fine morning at the scrub and although it has now been dry for quite a while, the place is looking good, being more sheltered in the gully. The Wonga vine was the most obvious flower but others are on their way and it will be worth a visit in the next few weeks. Asparagus vine continues to germinate and is starting to climb once again, so we will need to be vigilant and not allow it to regain the canopy.
Our efforts in controlling it have made such a difference to the place with some nice views through, and into it, now with the interesting variety of plants. Bamboo grass is doing well on the ground level and you will find interesting seedlings growing in it as well. Birds and butterflies are also busy.

Flowering at present

Yellow buttons Chrysocephalum apiculatum  were found to be flowering in the scrub in the first week of June.

May gathering

It was good get-together this morning. After working on cats claw and fruiting asparagus vine, we stopped for morning tea and discussion. Kristie Jenkinson came along. She brought along Darryl Kruger, who will be doing some of her work from next month, to meet us. (Kristie is expecting a baby in September.)

Kristie has such a busy schedule that - although she is the person in charge of volunteer groups, like ours, which work with the Toowoomba Regional Council - we rarely get to see her. It was particularly good to be able catch up, and to talk about our concerns. Her best news is that it seems very likely that Steve Plant will be working with us at our monthly working bees again. That will be a worry off our minds!

Dawn Heath of Condamine Alliance, also came to talk about joining the "Adopt-a-patch" programme. We had a thorough discussion of what sort of help she would be able to give us, and the decision was that we weren’t really keen on any of the original proposed ideas (bird boxes, root blades, and toad netting). However, we agreed that it would be helpful if Dawn could organise some more volunteers to work with us. At present we think this will begin in spring, probably on our regular working bee days. The project we thought we’d like help with is getting the cats claw back to a manageable level, but they might help with asparagus fern as well. The aim is to have just a small number of adult volunteers - 3 to 6 people - who would work closely with our members so we could get the weeds removed with minimal impact on other vegetation. The programme would all be administered by Dawn, so there would not need to be any

management of grant money by us.

Thanks very much to Gary Alcorn, who was the one with the get up and go to put the thing in train. 

Trish

Bad luck

This year the last Wednesday of April falls on Anzac Day so we are unlikely to have any takers for a gathering at Franke Scrub. We will be meeting again on May 30th, but the place is always open for a visit.