Up early again this morning, setting out to look for four possible year ticks in the Gold Creek area – Black Bittern, Emerald Dove, Major Mitchell’s Cockatoo and Masked Owl. All are difficult, and as I rolled up at a spot in Pullenvale at 0515, I reflected on how difficult the birds were getting now. Almost all the species I still need are rare local residents that are hard to connect with, or are generally only reliable at known stakeouts. After a few minutes, I heard a Masked Owl calling, which was excellent – I managed to get a recording of one call, but annoyingly I missed a second call because I turned the recorder off just before it did it (2.5 minutes after the first call). I trimmed the audio file down to just 10 seconds, containing one call.

Buoyed by this early success I headed to Gold Creek Reservoir, where my plan was to look for Black Bittern in the creek between the dam spillway and the car park. Despite carefully searching a decent section of the creek, I couldn’t turn up a Black Bittern – I’m not sure if they are always present here, but there was a good run of records this time last year, so I thought I’d try just on the offchance and to make a change from dipping Black Bittern at Sandy Camp and Mookin-Bah.

Giving up with the bittern as the daylight intensified, I headed to the entrance road to look for Emerald Dove, but it’s a tricky species to produce on demand, and I had neither sight nor sound of one. I drove a bit further back up the road and birded the roadside in more open country, seeing a cracking quartet of Yellow-tailed Black-Cockatoos fly over, but no sign of Emerald Dove. Another spot nearer Adavale Street dams produced a nice Eastern Spinebill but no Emerald Doves, or the scarce introduced Major Mitchell’s Cockatoo.

Many of the sightings of the introduced population of Major Mitchell’s Cockatoo have been around the Adavale Street area, and looking at the map I thought Savages Rd looked a good bet, being one of the few publicly-accessible areas near the locations of the recent sightings. I drove to the end of Savages Rd, and birded the last few hundred metres – nothing spectacular, but very birdy and enjoyable. This does look like a promising area to get a flyover Major Mitchell’s, but ultimately getting that species will be all about spending lots of time in the right area. I’ll have to put in a few long mornings here I think. With time up, I headed home, having missed three target (but very difficult) birds, and scored one. Not a bad result at this stage of the game.

With one year tick today my year list edged up to 270 species. I spent 3 hours 14 minutes birding, walked 6.214 km and drove 86.2 km. My chronological year list is here.