Our great southern migration

      As we were walking around Dederang (before the fires), we heard birds making a "ZZZ" sound. The sound was like a big bug zapper or a large bee. They looked like willie wagtails. I saw three gang up on a kookaburra- not typical wagtail behavior. Ebird helped figure it out. They were actually restless flycatchers. According to ebird, they make an "incomparable buzzing scissors-grinder sound". I did see them repeatedly gang up on other birds.  Flycatcher sound In Dederang, they were also fighting the installation of a lithium battery farm: There was already a power plant in place and this was to be replaced by two battery set ups. The locals were really worried about fires (fair!) and battery explosions. Since most everything would be downwind/downriver, they thought the health risk unacceptable.    The current power plant is already above regulated noise levels so they have to fix that before batteries could be installed. I recorded the sound but it isn...

  The New Holland Honeyeaters remind me of overgrown mosquitoes. They fly around at high speeds and have that very sharp beak. Luckily it gets used for obtaining nectar vs stabbing innocent humans. Around here, it isn't the mosquitoes but the ticks that give me grief!  We found brown and white cheeked honeyeaters where we have been housesitting in Swansea.  The white cheeked one is similar but different to the New Holland ones (bigger and different white patterns) The brown honeyeater seems to have gotten the short end of the stick with the naming convention and doesn't seem all brown to me! They do have a lovely song! But, I guess the brown honeyeater needs to be differentiated from the brown headed honeyeater we saw when we were visiting Rylstone.  There are still more but figure you are running out of interest at this point.  We had an international netflix party and watched K Pop Demon Hunters synchronously with the kids earlier today. Fun to just connect in...

  Sacred kingfisher as "robin" and  the black-faced cuckoo shrike as batman?  Sorry for the pause in postings. We have been on the Myall Lakes chain in a houseboat for four days. This was our 30th anniversary. We had big plans for 25 but it was 6 months into COVID times so everything was shut down. We went for a lovely walk in a local park instead. This time we took the 33 ft Aries on a 4 day adventure. Deck above with grill and bed down below. Very stable and not super fast.  Our last anchorage (we did drift slightly from this point in the wind). You can sorta see the tender (rowboat) out back. We took that to go ashore to find that kingfisher! We also took it to spend brunch with some of Madill's classmates for their 40th reunion. This required extra help from the Myall Lakes Getaway Houseboats  group- Shout out to Dallas and his kids for making it happen! And Happy Anniversary to us!