2017 Outback Queensland Trip - Birds - Charleville, Cunnamulla / Bowra, Eulo & Thargomindah

My birding adventures for this 2017 trip was to start at my families cattle grazing property near Charleville  800kms west of Brisbane.

I spent a couple of hours wandering around the house paddock on the day we arrived.

Brown Treecreepers are fairly common in the mulga area on this property.

Hooded Robin

There are 5 different sub species of Varied Sittella in Australia & this 1 is different to the Brisbane area form that I'm used to seeing.

Laughing Kookaburra.

Grey-crowned babbler enjoy going into the house yard.

Red-winged Parrot.

This Striated Pardalote pair are residents in the machinery shed.

The next morning I was out visiting an area of the property that I hadn't been birding that much along the higher stony ridge & Ironbark country.
I wandered around over a 4 km area for the best part of 7 1/2 hrs. I had the 4 WD motorbike with me, water & a packed sandwich.

Inland Thornbill

Chestnut-rumped Thornbill

Yellow Thornbill

A pair of White-browed Treecreepers were a surprise find & a new addition to the property list.

I was up on the stony ridges as my father had told me 3 mths earlier that he seen & heard Chestnut-breasted Quail-thrush there over the past 30 + years. I have been birding this property since 2011 now & didn't imagine that this property would have this specie as well. I'd only briefly visited a part of the area before the stony ridge.
It took me lots of walking & nearly 7 hrs before I located 2 birds.
They are a ground dwelling bird that like stony ridges, plenty of old fallen timber to feed & hide behind.
This site was a new addition to a very sparse eBird listing of sites for this specie & I was quite chuffed it was on my families property as well.

Striated Honeyeaters were calling most of the day & it was lovely to connect with 1 as well.

Next morning at the house paddock, I found a family of Squatter Pigeons wandering not far from the house yard.

Australian Ringneck Parrots feeding on lawn weeds.

There are 2 types of Miners at this water bath...Yellow-throated Miner on the left & Noisy Miner on the right.

We dove south of Charleville to visit an Australian Wildlife Conservancy property near Cunnamulla.
Bowra is very popular amongst the birding community.
Visitors must pre book before arriving as the property camping could already be at capacity during the spring months. Once we checked in with the caretakers, we made camp near the shearing shed.

There are a few main areas to explore over the > 50,000 acre property. Most of the dams are now dry.
The only water available now is a creek - Saw Pits & Gum Holes, 1 back dam & the house bore lagoon.
Most times a 2 WD car would be ok to drive out to the back paddocks, but if it has recently rained, the Saw Pits will be impassable unless you're in a 4WD vehicle, added by the possibility of bogging in several places.

Mulga Parrot

Crested Bellbird

Horsfields Bronze-cuckoo.

This is the bore lagoon at the campground. The afternoon setting sun made quite a picture.

The next day I went out for the day with a packed lunch & plenty of water & drove to many of the popular hotpspots.

Female Red-capped Robin.

I parked the car up on the bank of the only dam with water & waited in the vehicle to see what birds would come in to water.
2 Major Mitchell's Cockatoo arrived & eventually several honeyeaters.

Now this rather woolly flock of sheep were a major surprise. There aren't supposed to be any sheep on the property, so these must be strays from a neighbouring property.....it's been many years since they've had their fleece shorn.

Zebra Finchs were on the bare dry ground looking for morsels of seed.

Female White-winged Fairywren. I didn't see any coloured males this time.

White-necked Heron at Gum Holes.

Amongst the mulga was this Red-capped Robin.

I came across a set of cattle yards near the back paddock & a bore pipe had been broken for a while & was leaking water. It is here that I found a group of Bourke's Parrots resting in the trees shade.

A female Splendid Fairywren.

Back at the homestead & camp ground I found a few dozen Black-tailed Native-hens

This Spotted Crake arrived to the campground bore lagoon a few weeks earlier & had called the wetland home.

There are several dozen grey kangaroos using the bore lagoon & the grasslands next to the lagoon.

We left Bowra & headed west towards Eulo. Our next stop would be Paddabilla Bore aka Eulo Bore. It is a popular free camp 12 kms east of Eulo & a great bird watching site.
The large camp site is on private property & the bore water is piped to cattle troughs.
There was a small dam of water for the birds.

Varied Sittella walk up or down the trunks & branches & can often be seen up side down.

Further west was Lake Bindegolly. The lake is usually a huge wetland stretching a couple of kms, but is now completely dry.
I did find a few bush birds like this Mulga Parrot.

A Brown Falcon was terrorising the smaller birds.

We arrived at Thargomindah..
I was there to track down Grey Grasswrens that had been reported in the lignum down on the Cooper Creek. I walked around the lignum area several kms south of town for several hours & alas didn't locate any Grey Grasswrens. I even returned the next morning without success.

I did love the colouring of this Crimson Chat.

An Australian Hobby flew onto a dead tree to eat it's prey of what looked like a Spiny-cheeked Honeyeater.

I found a young Wedge-tailed Eagle as well.

New to my life list was this White-fronted Honeyeater. Once I noticed this 1, there were actually a dozen of them. (Life list is a new specie not seen by me before)

From Thargomindah we headed north-west towards Birdsville. Those birds are in the next chapter.