Tallow Creek in Suffolk Park, north New South Wales is a hot spot for birds. It also provides a virtual photographer’s backdrop of scenes, settings and lighting with soft light mellowed by the reeds and waters of the creek.
Small birds at Tallow Creek
Some days the small birds turn up in force and today was one of those days. The best area to see them was around the old sewerage treatment ponds, between the camping ground and the bridge across Tallow Creek (at Byron Bay, New South Wales).
Why do Masked Lapwings cross the creek?
It is puzzling why this Masked Lapwing family cross the creek so often. Each crossing involves considerable effort and risk, firstly to make sure that the route is secure, then to encourage the young to make the move.
Birds cooperating at Tallow Creek
Tallow Creek in Byron Bay, New South Wales forms what is known as an Intermittently Closed and Open Lagoon (ICOLL). The creek and lagoon’s connection to the ocean is closed periodically by an accumulation of sand up to fifty metres wide. Every few months, after very heavy rain fills the lagoon, it overflows and washes away sand to form a channel to the sea and then the lagoon quickly empties.
Over the days following this outflow a procession of water birds search the newly exposed banks for food. Ducks, Egrets, Dusky Moorhens, Ibis, Spoonbills and Swamphen. What can be quite frantic feeding sees some bird odd couples seemingly working together.
Leaden Flycatcher's nest washed away
At the start of last week we saw this pair of Leaden Flycatchers putting the finishing touches to a nest, about three metres above the waters of Tallow Creek in Byron Bay New South Wales. Later it looked like the birds were taking turns sitting on the nest.
Today, after two day of storms and torrential rain there is sadly no sign of the nest, presumably washed off its perch.
Peregrine Falcon makes unexpected visit
This unexpected visitor arrived after dusk at Tallow Creek in the Northern Rivers, New South Wales. It took a few moments to identify the bird landing for a drink in the dark. The pictures were taken at ISO 6,500 and are only usable thanks to the new AI assisted Denoise feature in Adobe Lightroom, which does a remarkable job of noise reduction.
Birds on the Back Fence
There have been a number of interesting birds turn up in our Byron Bay back yard the last few weeks, two of them shown here.
Back to Tallow Creek
I decided to return to Tallow Creek at Suffolk Park in the Northern Rivers region of NSW. A previous visit of a couple of hours photographing around sunset resulted in a number of close ups of interesting birds and some very good evening lighting (Link to “Tallow Creek at Suffolk Park “). The walkway to the bridge that crosses the creek takes you through creek-side reed beds for close ups of reed birds and finches. The sporadic trees provide for close ups with clear space behind that give a nice blur to the background of the photo. This latest trip proved equally fruitful with the photos below.
Tallow Creek at Suffolk Park
Suffolk Park is a suburb of Byron Bay on the North Coast of NSW. The Tallow Creek estuary forms the southern border of the Arakwal National Park and it is home to a wide variety of bird-life.