My 2019 Birding Year – Lauren Tomkinson

Lauren in the field

Ever since I was born, 12 years ago, my parents have been taking me birding.

 My 2019 birding year started off great, I love owls, and in January, on a night drive through Sunday Creek Road, we were lucky enough to find half a dozen fledgling Australian Boobook owls. Sooo cute! Later in the year, on other night-time outings, I also got to see my first Sooty Owls and Masked Owls. I didn’t see any Powerful Owls or Barking Owls this year though, unless you count the beautiful Barking Owl Silo Art which I saw while on holiday at Goorambat in Victoria. 

Sooty Owl [mum]

Masked Owl [mum]

Masked Owl [me]

Fledgling Boobook mum]

Barking Owl - Silo portrait

I also saw my first Marbled Frogmouth this year. I can remember all the way back to 2014, when I was 6 and I went on my first night-time Birdlife Members walk at Charlie Moreland’s and I could hear a Marbled Frogmouth but I couldn’t see it, despite us staying behind for hours to walk the circuit track with Steve and Carol after all the other members had left. So to finally see a Marbled Frogmouth this year, sitting on a branch close to the road was an exciting find.

My Marbled Frogmouth pic

My Boobook

Because I don’t have a facebook page yet, I don’t post in the facebook birdcount challenge, but I do use QuestaGame. This year I competed in the Maroochy Wetlands Eco-challenge for kids. I had competed in previous years but this year I tried extra hard and submitted lots of bird photo’s, although most of them were blurry. The camera I was using was a 2^nd hand Nikon P510 on auto setting, it has a great zoom but unless the birds sit still for me my photo’s are just plain awful. The only good photo I got over the 2 week competition was a Large-Billed Scrubwren. If you identified the sightings you got extra points, a lot of the common ones I knew, the others I had to look up in my bird book and using google. I put a lot of time in submitting photo’s and trying to identify them and I was so excited when I heard I won!

My Large billed Scrubwren

Birding legend!

In September, when my parents took me on a driving holiday I saw lots of birds in the outback on our way to Darwin. I also saw lots of birds at the Corroboree Billabong where we travelled through the everglades on an airboat, but my biggest dip was at Nitmiluk Gorge where I saw, but didn’t get a photo of their rare visitor, a Great Billed Heron.

My Dad goes to Cape York nearly every year for his holidays and next year he is taking me to the Cape and to the Tip of Australia, I am so looking forward to 2020 and all the new birds I will see on the way.