Summary: Enjoyable location with better bird habitats than you might expect in Gold Coast suburbia Dates of visits: 20 Aug 2022, 13 Aug 2023, 25 Dec 2023 Varsity Lakes is a locality on the Gold Coast which, like many suburbs on the Goldy, is dominated by waterways (canals and lakes). In this case the largest ..read more

Summary: Unique and interesting birding site providing a few different habitats in close proximity Dates of visits: Eight or more visits between 2021 and 2024. You’d have to think a nature site that encompasses grassland, bushland, tidal wetland, a bird hide and Brisbane’s best mangrove boardwalk would be pretty good, right? This is such a ..read more

We made a ten day trip made from July 19 to July 28, 2024, mainly visiting nature sites around Darwin and Kakadu National Park, a journey very similar to one we made back in 2021. So we knew what we were getting ourselves in for… rainless – usually cloudless – days, tropical heat, and more ..read more

Summary: Great site for a good variety of bush birds, especially in winter Dates of visits: Several from 2020 to 2024 Hardings Paddock is an excellent birding site in the Ipswich city area. It is a little hard to make generalisations about this location, as it tends to vary quite a bit from season to season and year to year. But here’s an attempt anyway! The site is one of the best in south-east Queensland to see some magnificent bush birds, especially in and around the winter months: Rose Robin, Jacky Winter, and Spotted Quail-Thrush being a few of the well known species. You might well also ..read more

Summary: Remote tropical lowland rainforest with unique and special birding Dates of visit: Nov 13 to 17, 2023 Kutini-Payamu or Iron Range National Park is a large national park in Cape York, right at the top of Queensland. Biologically this region is heavily influenced by nearby Papua New Guinea, providing a smorgasbord of birds that can’t be found anywhere else in Australia, so for that reason alone it holds quite an appeal. This blog post attempts a comprehensive coverage of birding at Iron Range, based on a trip made in November 2023 where our birding group of three visited all the main ho ..read more

Chicago, the windy city, hosts many migrating birds in spring and in May 2024 also hosted two Australian bird enthusiasts. Was it windy? Yes, and it was sometimes rainy, but fortunately we had a few sunny days to explore some major hotspots as well as appreciate the impressive city architecture and a few of the many excellent restaurants. Our original plan was to use Chicago as a base to explore a little around Illinois, and to hop across to Magee Marsh in Ohio, a very highly regarded spring migration site. However, we opted in the end to stay within Chicago’s boundary and concentrate on what ..read more

The next region on our epic five-week North American birding tour started with big ole Arizona. We flew into Tucson from Texas (another state that experiences an influx during migration) and drove straight to Portal way down in south-east Arizona. We then worked our way back west and north, in what came to be the “canyon discovery” tour: yes there was plenty of shameless touristing and gawking at epic landscapes in between the birding sites. We ended this leg by flying out of Las Vegas, actually a pretty productive birding spot given that it’s kind of an oasis in the desert. Portal and Cave Cr ..read more

Texas! It’s the Lone Star state, where everything is bigger. But did you know that south Texas is one of the most biodiverse areas in the USA? We did, so we planned to go there as the first stop on our 5-week North America birding trip. It was mid-April, just getting into the peak levels of birds migrating into the US from southerly climes, so a perfect time to go and see as many interesting birds as possible. Culinan Park, Houston We flew directly from San Jose, Costa Rica to Houston and picked up a hire car, staying just one night in the big city. For the morning we headed to Culinan Park in ..read more

Costa Rica has long been known as a birder’s paradise and is one of the best, if not the best country in Central America to spend some time birding in. We flew direct from Brisbane, Australia to Los Angeles and then after a mere six hour layover, into San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica. Being our first visit birding in the Americas, every bird we saw (save for Rock Doves and Ospreys) was new to us, which made it tremendously exciting – though I am sure it would have been anyway! We had a week put aside for Costa Rica and concentrated mainly on Rancho Naturalista, two hours drive (in theory ..read more

Summary: Lovely rainforest island not far from Cairns with some interesting birdlife Date of visit: Nov 18 2023 Green Island is a small island of 12 hectares in the Great Barrier Reef, accessible in around 40 minutes by ferry from Cairns. It is the only coral cay on the reef that has rainforest, and it has reliable populations of Black Noddies, Buff-Banded Rails, Ashy-Bellied White-Eyes (somewhat hybridised with Silvereyes), and several species of terns. The island has a main walking track that leads into the National Park section, and pops you out onto the beach on the eastern side, from wher ..read more