Sunday 2 October 2016

Go South 17 -- Sydney

The last part of the trip home was via Sydney where the missing Paradise Shelduck had been spotted in a farmer's vegetable paddock near Richmond north of Sydney. Certainly not the hardest twitch, I was able to spot him within a short while of arriving at the site. This bird [assuming the same one and that two did not arrive independently] had been first seen at Christmas time at Lake Wollumboula near Culburra Beach near Nowra on the NSW coast. This was the first recorded sighting of this endemic New Zealand species on the Australian mainland. My dairy farmer friends from NZ tell me they are a bit of a pest over there and in the not too distant past, had organised population reduction shoots. They are the equivalent of our Australian Shelduck. He had been there for a week or so when a large storm front moved through and he disappeared.

First sighting of the Paradise Shelduck 



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