I flew back from Hobart to Brisbane via Melbourne, and my plane touched down about 1.30pm. My wife and kids had come to meet me at the airport, and had brought birding stuff, so I could do a kind of reverse superman and change into my tatty old birding clothes and don binoculars and a telescope. After some debate, we decided I’d drop the family at DFO for shopping, and I’d take the car and drive to Tinchi Tamba. There had been no definite sighting of the Buff-breasted Sandpiper this morning, although Louis Backstrom had a brief look at a bird he thought was probably it.

I wasn’t enormously hopeful, but as I pulled into the car park and bumped into Michael Daley, I thought at least it’ll be fun looking. We slopped through mud out to the plain, and two things were immediately apparent. There were hundreds of shorebirds, and it was extremely windy. We set about sorting through the birds, but they were fairly mobile, and large numbers spent most of their time hunkered down and tricky to view. We met up with John Hoekstra, David Stewart, Deb Metters, Peter Hayes and a few other folks. There was a really nice flock of 160+ Black-tailed Godwits, about 25 Red Knots, 20 Marsh Sandpipers and a bunch of other shorebirds, but no-one had a sniff of the Buff-breasted Sandpiper. I had to leave about 4.30 to go back and pick the others up from DFO.

And that’s what happens when I leave Brisbane for a day!

With no year ticks today, my year list remained on 301 species. I spent 2 hours 7 minutes birding in Brisbane, walked 3.682 km and drove 0 km. My chronological year list is here.