The last Wildlife Queensland trip for the year took us further from home than usual, to Zoe Bay on Hinchinbrook Island. It was a lovely day and I’m sure a full report with lots of photos will appear in due course on the WQ Townsville site. (Edit: it’s now here).
All I want to do here is to post a photo of a Pied Imperial Pigeon, Ducula spilorrhoa, on its nest to complement my earlier posts about them on Green Path.
We met in a small park near the Dungeness boat ramp and spent our waiting time, naturally, birdwatching. This was one of several PIP nests we spotted in a clump of paperbarks there. Each was an untidy, unstable-looking twig platform, easy enough to see once we knew what they looked like – in fact, believing that they were functional nests was harder than seeing them.
In the same clump we also saw a Friarbird on its nest, well camouflaged by virtue of the fact that it was neatly woven out of strips of the tree’s own bark.
The full report on the trip has been posted to the WQ blog and is now here.