In-between fieldwork: Laughing kookaburra

Laughing kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae) - love them! They are loud and bossy, but also manage to appear very cuddly.

Very entertaining to watch, I had so much fun watching them dig for worms and eat them up like they were spaghetti.

We do have some issues with the ones on the study side as they are very used to people. This means that when we are mist-netting in order to catch superb fairy-wrens and ring them we have to be really careful and watch out for kookaburras. They will come very close to people and the nets and might try to grab any birds that fall into the net. They just sit there and wait!

In-between fieldwork: Koala

Koalas in Canberra are extinct, which is a great shame. Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve used to have a few captive koalas, but from what I have been told all but one of them died in the big 2003 bush fires. Poor things.

Some koalas have been translocated back to the reserve recently and I saw those. They have a little house there, where some of them sleep. They live up to the cuteness standards.

I was also lucky enough to see one of them awake and climbing around. At one point he was hanging using only his arms,flailing his legs around - pretty funny sight!

In-between fieldwork: Dusky Woodswallow

Dusky Woodswallow (Artamus cyanopterus). I couldn't get much closer, but they spent ageeees preening each other and I got several very cute shots of this pair. If you think that they don't look quite right for a swallow you won't be surprised to read that they are actually more closely related to currawongs and Australian magpies than they are to swallows.

I even managed to see a nest, bowl-shaped and made of twigs, tucked behind a bit of bark. No photos though as I didn't want to bother the birds.

In-between fieldwork: Magpie-lark

Magpie-lark (Grallina cyanoleuca). Odd critters, very boldly behaving, not scared to come up to people. Foraging in open grass a lot. Kind of reminding me of little dinosaurs.

Males and females can be distinguished by markings on their heads. Pay attention to the black stripes across the eyes. Males have a horizontal black stripe:

And females have a vertical black stripe and also have white throats:

Update: "in-between fieldwork" every other Thursday

Me again. I have decided that for now In-between fieldwork posts with Australian wildlife will appear on Thursdays (completely arbitrary).

I'm currently scheduling posts for every other Thursday to gauge how much material I have and will go from there - if there is lots left over I might bump it to a weekly Thursday post. Either way, if you are mainly interested in the photos hopefully this will make it easier for you to know when to pop back :]

In-between fieldwork: Australian king parrot

Those guys were easiest to spot in the late afternoon. There were some trees on my way home where they seemed to forage a lot. Their roost must have been somewhere else, as I never saw them stay there for the night and they were never there during my morning cycle down.

I've seen them eat some nuts and buds and their feet are surprisingly agile, they could handle even very small pieces of food well.

In the above photos you can see females. For easy comparison a profile of a female below - mainly green bird with red belly.

While male plumage is much redder and the red spreads all over the bird's head, neck and nape. Wings are green.

In-between fieldwork: Black-fronted dotterel

Black-fronted dotterels (Elseyornis melanops) are not very common around Canberra and I only managed to see a pair during my visit.

They were very easy too spook and didn't allow me to approach at all, every time I tried to take a step in their direction they would strut off hurriedly. They were moving around quite nervously and most of my photos came out rather blurry.