I had an little bit of excitement at the cottages today.  I was cleaning at the Pioneer cottage and my daughter told me there was a Victoria’s Riflebird displaying above the cottage. Of course it was finished by the time I got there!  But we could hear the swooshing of wings coming from the forest, so I sent my daughter in the direction of the sound, somewhere behind the Beach cottage. She came back and reported she saw two males displaying, one was on a log but was interrupted by a pademelon and flew off, and one over on the ginger heads. I went over to take a look, one male was still at the ginger plants, poking around in the flower heads, but nearby was a young male practicing his moves on a post. I took some nice footage of him, see the video below. If you can’t see the video here, please go to my YouTube page.

Then we took a walk over to the pond.  There was a small, harmless green tree snake there.  We almost stepped on it.  It was about 30cm in length, and was not as the name would suggest, but a blue/grey morph.  It was very shy and immediately moved away from us.  See the photo below. Click to make bigger.

At the pond a female Golden Whistler came down for a bath.  She landed on a lily pad and splashed around on top of it.  I haven’t seen a bird do that before.  Though once on a hot day when I was watering our vege patch, a little pale-yellow robin bathed in the water that collected on a pawpaw leaf up in the tree.  Here is the whistler sitting on the lily pad, click to make bigger.

Earlier in the day I caught a male Golden Whistler attacking his reflection in the side view mirror of my car.  He also likes to attack his reflection in the windows of the cottages, leaving behind smudges and scratches for me to clean up.  Here is a picture I took of a male at the pond yesterday.

Also in the afternoon I was chasing a Pied Monarch for a half decent photo, but he was too high up  (see below), and the Yellow-breasted Boatbill teased me for a while, but I no luck at getting a photo.


It was an interesting day.