Description: Mount Majura Nature Reserve, on the lower slopes of Mount Majura, is part of Canberra Nature Park. The plant community here is Yellow Box – Blakely’s Red Gum Grassy Woodland, one of the most endangered ecological communities in Australia (over 90% cleared). Friends of Mt Majura work to protect and enhance the natural environment on Mount Majura and its surroundings and have undertaken significant habitat restoration.
Birds we may see include Speckled Warbler, Common Bronzewing, Sacred Kingfisher, Golden and Rufous Whistler, Varied Sittella, Mistletoebird, Dusky Woodswallow and Fuscous Honeyeater.
Meeting time and place: 8:30am. Corner of Tay and Ian Nicol St, Watson. There is a small carpark near the entrance gate to the reserve.
Walking distance: max of 3 km
Degree of difficulty: Easy, including some off-track walking.
End time (approx.): 11:00 am
What to bring: water, snack if wanted, hat, sunscreen
Registration : Please register with the leader, Sally Stephens, by email to sallysstephens@icloud.com providing your name and mobile number, and the name and mobile number of an emergency contact. Please do so before 7pm on Friday 25 April.
I once did a bird survey on Clancy’s Walking Track and saw only Pied Currawongs and Noisy Miners. Not so today. Ably led by first time leader Sally Stephens, we found a couple of mixed feeding flocks (MFFs) that afforded great views of excellent birds. Fourteen of us met at the gate near the junction of Ian Nicol & Tay streets in Watson, and received a good briefing from Sally about the area’s land use and its restoration by the Friends of Mt Majura group. It was grazed from the 1830s to 1985 and now has some grassy woodland and maturing plantings that provide good habitat for smaller birds. We wandered off track directly up the slight incline to get to the thicker understory and away from the Noisy Miners and many, many Currawongs that patrolled the outskirts of the block. We followed the sounds of White-throated Treecreeper and Grey Butcherbird, and saw a Common Bronzewing, and a Laughing Kookaburra being chased by a currawong. Our first MFF delivered Grey Fantails, Spotted and Striated Pardalotes, Weebills, Yellow-rumped, Brown and Buff-rumped Thornbills, Golden Whistlers, and the world’s cutest display of shirt-fronting as two male Scarlet Robins got territorial in full view of our group. We meandered down to the dam towards the Federal Highway/Valour Park following the calls of Brown-headed Honeyeater. We found another MFF (or was it the same party, moved to a new location?) that delivered another riot of small birds, including a Speckled Warbler, White-eared Honeyeater, Superb Fairy-wrens and a small flock of Yellow-eared Honeyeaters. There was also a very relaxed echidna that ambled from the far side of the dam towards us with without fear.
Along our path we also saw plenty of the colourful big guys – Australian King Parrots, and Crimson and Eastern Rosellas, and an Eastern Spinebill came by right at the end making up the 32 species we saw over two and a half hours.
Despite her disclaimers she was still somewhat of a beginner, Sally did a great job leading the group, deftly leveraging the local know-how of the Mt Majura regular, and the ID skills of the more experienced birders. For those of us with poor aural memories, it was a reminder that recognising birds calls is a special kind of superpower. I’ll keep practicing.
[Said experienced birders took the opportunity at the end of our walk to put in a plug for more volunteers to lead walks. You don’t need gold-standard IDing skills; you just need a place, and some enthusiasm, which we had today. It was a great day.]
Beck Redden
