Up before dawn and drove over to Micha Jackson’s place at Paddington. Brad Woodworth met us there and the three of us piled into my car and drove down to Lake Manchester. Even before dawn had broken, we parked at the base of the ridge track, and walked up toward the western end of Dam Break 11, where the Dusky Woodswallows had been seen a couple of days ago. One of the first birds to appear when there was sufficient light was a nice Rose Robin, my first of the year. They are winter visitors to Brisbane, and although they’d been around for a couple of weeks I hadn’t spent any time in the right habitat so far. We pushed on up the hill, and looped back via the lake track and car park but could find no sight nor sound of Dusky Woodswallow, although a couple of White-breasted Woodswallows gave us a scare at one point. The birding was good, with Buff-rumped Thornbill, Restless Flycatcher, Weebill, two different groups of Varied Sittellas and about 5 Rose Robins. All really nice stuff, but not the mega year tick I was hoping for.

We exited the car park and headed south across the road to Shelley Road Park, an amazing Brisbane City Council parkland that had hosted a Red-backed Kingfisher a few weeks ago. Notable birds were Restless Flycatcher, Brown Falcon and Nankeen Kestrel, but despite our optimism we couldn’t turn up anything rare. Time was ticking on and we had to get to work, so we left about 1000.

After my meeting at work I had a couple of hours before the end of the day, and decided to head to Oxley Creek Common. Chris Attewell had texted earlier saying he’d had a Spotted Harrier again this morning. I couldn’t resist and headed to the common, arriving about 1430. I walked down the track toward Jabiru Swamp, and bumped into Ged Tranter along the way. He showed me his incredible photos of an adult Spotted Harrier, but hadn’t seen it for a couple of hours. I was happy it was still around, but tense because I still hadn’t seen it. I needn’t have worried because after about a minute Ged shouted he’d seen the harrier, and sure enough a splendid adult Spotted Harrier appeared and began quartering the main paddock. Absolutely amazing. It did a few reasonably close passes allowing some photos. Presently a Swamp Harrier appeared, completing a brilliant harrier duo.

Ged left the common, and I pressed on to the Secret Forest looking for Collared Sparrowhawk without luck. On the way back to the Red Shed, an Accipiter burst out of the trees in front of me and belted across the common, landing in a tree quite some distance away. It had a long, narrow tail with what looked like a nicely squared off tip, but I couldn’t get much more than that in field views. I got a few extremely distant shots of the perched bird, but it disappeared before I could get my scope on it. The pics are below, and I’m happy they show a Collared Sparrowhawk.

With a whopping three year ticks today (Rose Robin, Spotted Harrier and Collared Sparrowhawk), my year list rose to 266 species. I spent 6 hours 8 minutes birding, walked 11.789 km and drove 112.4 km.

Tail looks reasonably narrow, but hard to discern shape of the tip from this pic

This pic is the most informative, and shows square-ended tail, with slight notch, spindly legs, and what I fancy looks like a small head with a staring expression. But it is a heavy crop of a photo taken at great distance!

The head looks smallish and flattish in this pic.

Hard to tell given the angle, but maybe the secondaries look like they are bulging behind the rest of the wing (although compare with the top pic, which shows quite a straight trailing edge to the wing). Again, narrow tail but hard to discern the shape of the tip from this pic.

Rose Robin is strictly a winter visitor to Brisbane.