Date: Thursday, November 2, 2017
Project: Eastern Australian Waterbird Survey
Our routine on our second day down in this part of the world was to always spend the morning, ended up being over four hours, flying down the Murray-Mouth and surveying both east and west sides of the North and South Coorong, twice. It was a long way, given the Coorong is about 130km of saline lagoons http://www.environment.sa.gov.au/parks/find-a-park/Browse_by_region/Limestone_Coast/coorong-national-park .
Early morning survey down past the Mouth of the River Murray with its dredges to maintain its opening out to sea.
The Coorong had tens of thousands of waterbirds but nothing like the numbers we have seen in the past. There were mostly teal, grey teal and chestnut teal, quite a few Australian sheldduck. There were also large flocks of red-necked avocets.
Shorelines of the South Coorong had flocks of 10-20 teal about every 200-300 metres, Australian shelduck and silver gulls.
The usual pelican colony on an island in the South Coorong was bigger than normal. It is always and impressive sight.
Impressive pelican colony in the South Coorong, under our wing.
And we only saw a few banded stilts and migratory shorebirds. In the past, we have seen tens of thousands of these birds. Perhaps it was still comparatively wet in the southeast of the continent, compared to up north, and there was still lots of habitat around for them. After our two counts on the Coorong, we refuelled and then headed out for our second counts on Lakes Alexandrina and Albert.
Lake Alexandrina as always was first. We flew its western boundary which included the barrages, concrete barriers which maintain its freshwater, stopping the seawater come in from the Murray Mouth. Here is a good spot for the fish eating birds to feed on the fish that come in and out of the saltwater. We also saw what we initially thought were strange rubber structures sticking out of the water until we realised that there were a couple of fur seals sunning themselves on their backs in the freshwater Lake Alexandrina.
Surveying Lake Alexandrina along the western shoreline where there are the barrages
The pied cormorant and great cormorant colony on Lake Alexandrina was particularly impressive. This regularly establishes but this year seemed even bigger than we had seen it in the past.
Guano-caked trees were white, marking the massive cormorant colony on Lake Alexandrina
Given the large numbers of comorants, there were also some staggeringly large feeding flocks of cormorants and pelicans in Lake Alexandrina and Lake Albert.
Pelicans and cormorants take flight from a feeding flock on Lake Alexandrina.
From half-way along Lake Alexandrina, we headed south to survey Lake Albert. This had reasonably large numbers of fish eating birds and one colony of straw-necked ibis but wasn’t quite as impressive as Lake Alexandrina.
Surveying the western shoreline of Lake Albert.
Not only did Lake Alexandrina have a large colony of cormorants but it also had several colonies of straw-necked ibis, ranging in size from less than a hundred to perhaps five to ten thousand. It has become increasingly clear that this system is much more important for these colonially breeding waterbirds than we previously thought.
One of the straw-necked ibis colonies on Lake Alexandrina.