Sorry, this update is more a health report than  birding report, although I’m happy to report I am now strong enough for some gentle birding again!

I eventually went into the Mater hospital on Friday 2nd March with severe fevers and chest pains from pleurisy, after a chest x-ray showed I had pneumonia. But this wasn’t to be the end of the story – the staff in the emergency department found very high glucose levels in my blood and immediately suspected Type I diabetes. Further tests showed this to be the right diagnosis and I started receiving insulin. After staying in 3 nights, I came out of hospital on 5th March and now inject insulin four times a day – lots of fun! Hopefully this won’t impact birding (or life in general) too much – plenty of people seem to live full lives with T1D (as the trendies call it).

One serious impact of this hospitalisation was missing the Sunshine Coast pelagic on 4th March. This was a cruel twist of fate after securing a spot on the previously booked-out trip. This has heightened my resolve to arrange a Brisbane trip, and either way, I’m booked on the May and June Sunshine Coast pelagic trips.

During this period I was unable to go birding, and my year list remained on 244. The best bird was a cracking adult Wedge-tailed Eagle over the house on 10th March.