My Deen Maar specials

Well they may be easy fodder for the more serious & experienced birder but Deen Maar introduced me to some species I hadn't had much to do with.

Firstly I was introduced to the Southern Emu-wren. I didn't go there looking for them & had not seen them before nor read much about them.
So embarrassingly I...

• didn't notice the emu feather tail until checking photos later on!
• thought I must have two lifers, having seen the tincy dark brown female (was quite disappointed to realise they were the same bird - please correct me if I'm wrong!)

The second bird had me rifling through the hitherto largely untouched pages 164-197 of my 2001 Pizzey. Oh my God - I had ignored those pages for good reason! When I saw this bird (actually a pair) I thought "Great, easy tick!" Some 45 minutes of exploring various resources later I realised - not so easy! Comparing my photos with various descriptions and other images I have nervously (Pizzey "uncommon regular migrant to to s. Australia") but confidently concluded that this is a Wood sandpiper:

Finally I also enjoyed first decent photographs of what I believe to be Golden-headed cisticola and Striated fieldwren.

As I mentioned on the previous Deen Maar post, I believe I was the only person out there. This is just as well as anyone following me would have seen a lot of this:

Post-Wood sandpiper perfect take-off

Go on click on it, you know you want to!

And I see that the Buff Budgies are just making up bird names now - or at least seeing things I don't believe exist. Congratulations Richard on Red-browed pardalote. Is that bird 206 for the year?

Spell check doesn't like pardalote. Look it did it again.... pardalote, pardalote, pardalote.

Peter (RTs - now on 144 glorious Victorian birds)