No swans at the Swan Bay jetty this afternoon but plenty of little pied cormorants. At one point, there must have been a hundred or more of them lined up along the railing but then someone walked past and they all took off.The someone was an elderly woman on her afternoon constitutional. She stopped to ask 'Have you ever seen so many shags in one place?'
I had to think about that.
They settled on an abandoned trailer and boats moored in the shallow waters. The little pieds shared the boats with the more retiring little black cormorants. I wouldn't want the job of cleaning off the guano. Could this be the origin of the term 'poop deck'?
Less numerous than the cormorants but nonetheless holding their own were silver gulls, Caspian terns and crested terns.
Caspian tern
Crested ternWhite-fronted chats foraged in the saltmarsh, invariably just that little bit too far away for a good photo. The orange-bellied parrots, if they were around, were keeping a low profile.
Where the orange-bellied parrots weren'tSo this is another place to add to my list of spots to visit again soon. At this rate, I'll never get to new locations but will be doing an endless round of the old ones. A bit like painting the Sydney Harbour Bridge ...
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Swan Bay jetty on Google Maps
