Tag: plovers

The Build 7: Nov 22, 2024

I see it’s been over a month since my previous post about the build. On the 28th of October there was a day of excitement as topsoil from the Banchory-Court-side of the site was piled onto the Carindale-Street-side of the site. One of the large old excavators in charge of the spreading and piling, while the two dump trucks took turns dumping their loads, while perhaps the other old excavator worked the loading.

In that time the majority of the work was done in the section nearest the gate into Surbiton Court. Pipes of several sizes put into the ground … huge concrete pipes in the pic below

And much smaller diameter, some kind of plastic. These often used as guttering drainpipes, in my experience, but here with the red coloring I assume are to house communication and electrical ducting.

Every time it rained work had to stop every second day unless there was a storm as well. The back lot–the parts that I can see from my balcony–filled with puddles and finally a pond-like sheet of water. The pic below is a couple of days later, with grass now growing well.

Birds are starting to congregate though I think it’s more likely that they are snacking on worms rising up and drowning, than fish miraculously appearing in the ankle-deep water and mud. I saw an ibis arrive this morning as well as a stone curlew. The plovers never went away. The approximately forty strong murder of Torresian crows that live in the trees alongside Carindale Street don’t seem to care who visits their grounds, I guess they get enough food across the road. (Carindale Shopping Mall)

 And finally, a mystery object pulled out of the ground?

Well, I know what it is. It surprised me to see one so near to a city center … Cattle grid? I wonder whether when the first village was built back in the 1980s, cattle roamed along the creek?

Plover aka ‘Masked Lapwing’

By Charles J. Sharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=145114385

These last few day, whenever I walk into the bedroom for something, I stop and stare out through the windows at a little place on the grass beyond the podium at the plovers nesting there. Pronounced as ‘pluvvers’ according to a long-time Brisbanite.

My camera really does not do it justice so here’s where your imagination must come into play. [If you want to have a go at zooming in? The bird is sitting a little below the third panel of fencing from the right. All you will see is a little brown blob.]

In the last few days, I’ve only seen a couple of intrepid people take the concrete path from the podium across the grass to the old village. One of the dog-walkers had an angry, swooping bird follow them from one end of the path to the other. And, these birds are said to have a poisonous spur on their “wrists” … they have the spurs but they’re not poisonous.

“Breeding usually happens after the winter solstice (June 21), but sometimes before.” Quote from the Wikipedia article. Spot on. The birds began sitting seriously about four days ago. It’ll be interesting to see how long they take to hatch the eggs, as there is no info on that in my bird book or in the Wikipedia article. Today I was lucky enough to see the change over of parents a few minutes after dusk.

The chicks will be dependent on the parents for protection for about 5 months. I can’t see there being enough food (insects and worms) in that grassy area for that long, but if it does happen to suffice, I hope we residents can stay patient enough to see the chicks to maturity.

Talk about counting your chickens before they hatch! The Wildlife of Greater Brisbane tells me suburban birds rarely manage to hatch their eggs. Dogs, cats, foxes, humans … all of them disrupting and chasing and some of them predating. That’s being glum, of course. I did read that the Brisbane Snake Catchers as well as catching and relocating snakes, relocate plover nests. That has got to be a huge operation. Two large angry birds defending four eggs on a flattened bit of grass?

https://snakecatcherbrisbane.net.au/plover-management/

Just checked them and nope, they don’t. But they do give contact details to licensed plover catchers and a link to a neat “404 page IE a page not found”. [This latter will go into my collection of 404’s.]