I’m not getting a huge amount of birding time at the moment, only really getting out each Sunday. Having spent the last couple of weeks looking for Black-breasted Button-quail, I decided to wander round Shelley Road Park today, for another attempt to look for migrants. Rain had been falling over the past few days, and I thought it might be worth heading out west to check for stray inland birds. The brilliant Dali Lin has just commenced his PhD at UQ, and so I invited him along, ducking around to his temporary digs in West End at 0430 to pick him up. Dali works at the brilliantly-entitled Endemic Species Research Institute in Taiwan, and will be spending much of the next few years at UQ working on strategies for making Asian agriculture more bird-friendly. I was transported to Asia as we chatted about Taiwan’s endemic birds and the big success of eBird Taiwan.

We stopped roadside at Lake Manchester Rd, and also at the corner of Kholo Rd and Lake Manchester Rd, where a Jacky Winter was singing. Eventually we arrived at Shelley Road Park just after 0530, and completed an anticlockwise circuit in just under three hours. Unfortunately nothing spectacular was about, although a singing Bush-hen at the oxbow lake was a nice bonus. I’m not sure what’s going to break the year-tick drought! Maybe I’ll have to wait until the Sunshine Coast pelagic in November before moving the list on again!

With no year ticks today, my year list remained on 298 species. I spent 3 hours 14 minutes birding, walked 2.639 km and drove 83.8 km. My chronological year list is here.