Nature Notes - Birdwatching in Sydney

Having made an Autumn visit to Sydney, NSW, I had a couple of weeks of watching birds most of which were completely new to me. Though not all of them were. The first European settlers brought European birds with them so that they would feel at home, so house sparrows, starlings, blackbirds and goldfinches are all part of the avian scene. I saw quite a starlings, but the commonest bird in Sydney was another bird of that family, again not a native Australian bird, but one from the Indian subcontinent, the common mynah. They were all over the place, and very noisy. Like starlings, they gather together in urban trees at sunset, chattering noisily.

The most obvious native birds were the sulphur crested cockatoos, which are large, noisy and dazzlingly white in the sun. Other cockatoos included little corellas, and galahs. All of these can be very tame, and at the national park visitor centre I had to wade through a flock of feeding cockatoos and coots on the grass outside to get to the Gents! Sulphur crested cockatoos have adapted well to urban life, and I have a great picture of one perched on a shopping trolley outside one of the big malls. A more surprising urban bird was the Australian white ibis, a sociable heron-like bird that can be found hunting for scraps right in the heart of the city. One person I spoke to referred to them as “Bin Chickens”.

Other parrot species abound, but most of them are a lot shyer than cockatoos, though I was able to take some good shots of rainbow lorikeets, fast and noisy flyers that are adapted to feeding on flowers, crimson rosellas and other colourful small parrots. But I didn’t see any wild budgerigars, which are more associated with the open plains.

Mention of coots earlier reminds me that some birds have such a global range that, for example coots in Australia and coots here are the same species. There is also a moorhen, but the Australian bird, the dusky moorhen, is classed as a distinct species. The related but larger purple swamphen, though, is another species with a wide global distribution, and can be found also in India, South Africa, and Spain.

Other birds are migratory, and travel all the way from here to there, or there to here. These include waders like the greenshank, and seabirds like the Caspian tern I was able to see while out whale watching. Another bird found both here and in Australia is, to my surprise, the great crested grebe. They have dabchicks too, but the Australian bird is a different species from the dabchick, or little grebe, found here.

 

I saw lots of other interesting birds: magpie larks, red tailed finches, red necked avocets, Australian pelicans, royal spoonbills, black swans of course, wattlebirds, and the iconic kookaburra. Australian ravens with their strange and mournful cries, and magpies which are totally different to ours, and not actually members of the crow family. Black winged stilts with their impossibly long legs. My favourites were probably the tiny, long-tailed and highly coloured fairy wrens. I can’t wait to go back!