Parent birds learnt from their mistake
The oystercatchers are such creatures of habit that it has made it really easy for me to work out volunteer timetables to shepherd them across the lagoon.
This morning when I turned up and saw two oystercatchers standing in a place that was not normal my heart started pounding. Only two? I was wildly looking around the beach, where is the chick?
You start telling yourself to keep calm, place your things, find your binoculars, it will be alright. I'm fumbling in the bag to locate the binoculars, grabbed them, and started scanning the usual areas the chick tucks into. Finally, I located it under the far left, large mangrove. My heart beat started to lessen. It was well lodged under one of the low hanging branches with some loose, twisted branch there as well in chest deep water.
Heart starts to quicken again. What if it is actually stuck there in that loose twisted branch? The parents seem calm, grooming themselves on the beach,so maybe there is nothing to worry about.
Five minutes goes by and the chick starts to swim. Heart rate back to normal.
So why do something different today? It may be that they were trying to give it another small flying lesson. As soon as the chick waded onto the beach the parents flew off to the usual spot they land the chick at. It appeared they were trying to get the chick to fly over too, but being a teenager, it chose to walk over instead.
You will be pleased to hear the parent birds chose to change where to land the chick when they go back to the mangroves after yesterday's landing mishap. Landing it in amongst the grasses clearly tripped up the chick so today they headed for the big mangrove with shallow water in front rather than grass.
I had decided to change my camera angle and sit on the other side of the lagoon but did not know the parent birds were going to change the landing spot. There I was sitting on the tidal flat, in the receding waters being nipped by soldier crabs and fish that look like baby flathead, when the chick took off and seemed to be heading straight for me. I had to zoom out and, as usual, missed some of the flight, but managed to capture the chick doing a good landing.
On the downside today, while I was out there. a silver gull flew over my head and had a massive amount of fishing line hanging off one leg. I kept my eye on it and it landed not too far away so I went over to investigate. Clearly it was not well off as it looked like, apart from having line with 3 hooks attached to one leg, it may have swallowed some of the line.
I contacted our WIRES rep but the gull took off and flew straight over their heads just as they were arriving for rescue. Poor, poor bird. The NSW marine estate management plan had slated Cabbage Tree Creek and Basin as a fishing free area but then backed down after a campaign by the Fisher, Shooters and Farmers party that enlisted Alan Jones as a mouth piece. Such a shame. Our wildlife deserves some space free of the curse that fishing can cause.
