Have You Seen A Spotted Pardalote?

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The Spotted Pardalote

The spotted pardalote is a tiny bird, 8-10 cm long, found in coastal areas of eastern and southern Australia. Both male and female share similar colours and patterns with the female colouring being duller in appearance. This photo was taken at Ingleside on the Northern Beaches of Sydney.
It prefers eucalypt forests and woodlands but is seen in parks and gardens with a well-established eucalypt canopy, where it hides high up amongst the leaves. It is largely sedentary and relatively common in urban areas. Its status is of least concern.

Spotted pardalotes forage on leaves for small insects and the sugary exudates from leaves and psyllids (lerp).
It has a characteristic three-note call with the second two notes higher than the first; “sleep-may-be”. These calls are regularly repeated during the mating season from about June to January and give the bird its nick-name of “the headache bird”.
The spotted pardalote’s nest is typically excavated in an earth bank and is a lined chamber at the end of a narrow tunnel, but sometimes they nest in tree hollows or man-made structures including rolls of carpet.
Both parents share nest-building, incubation of eggs and the feeding of hatchlings; spending around 21 days in the nest.

Photo and story by Andrew Tiede
Bayview resident

What Is An Ornithologist?

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What Is An Ornithologist?

What do bird watchers call themselves? Very broadly, anyone who watches birds is a bird watcher. The children that feed bread to the ducks at the park, the neighbour with the bird feeder hanging in the backyard, visitors to the national parks to see if they can spot the powerful owl, and the enthusiast who plans her third trip to Borneo just to view that one species missing from her huge list of birds she has seen in the world–all these are bird watchers.

The term that describes a person who searches out and tries to identify all the birds they see, is usually called a birder. Birding often but not always includes listing–keeping careful track of birds they see, ticking them off on their lists. There are life lists, country lists, state lists, backyard lists, and year lists of all these types and more. Often compared to stamp collecting, Birders are concerned with identification and distribution of birds in order to find and collect sightings of them.

Field ornithology is the study of living birds in their natural habitat. Population status, behaviour, and nesting are some of the topics of field ornithology. Recording data including counting the number of individual birds seen is a major component of field ornithology.

Waterbrook Bayview and Waterbrook Bowral are surrounded by Ornithologists, who are providing our Ecologist Dr Anne Clements a wealth of data which is paramount to preserve and enhance their environment.