A Field Notebook: Bellarine Peninsula

Sunday, 25 November 2018

Bellarine Peninsula

So back in Australia and I found myself some decent self catering accommodation in Werribee and then contacted Melbourne Water and managed to get hold of the required key for the rest of the week. However, not wanting to spend all of my remaining time at the water treatment plant, today I decided to visit the Bellarine Peninsula near Geelong and about 110km south west of Melbourne CBD. It's a really impressive place full of great birds, impressive wetlands and glorious beaches.

However the first place I visited on the way to Ballarine was Jerringot Wetlands in the city of Geelong where I managed to see a few Latham's snipes which were new for me. This is a species which breeds in Japan and spends the northern hemisphere winter in Australia.

Black-faced (far left, far right) and pied cormorants near Portarlington with Melbourne behind. Pied cormorants are widespread in both Australia and New Zealand, but black-faced only occurs in southern Australia.

Amidst the beaches and salt marshes there are only a handful of freshwater lakes, but where they do occur they can be quite fruitful, attracting reasonable numbers of ducks. At Lake Lorne I came across at least 30 freckled ducks. This is a species which I was so delighted to see on the last day of my last visit to Australia in July at Herdsmans Lake near Perth.

I never seem able to get good photos of freckled ducks, this is about the best I've managed so far.

Lonsdale Lakes near Point Lonsdale held good numbers of red-necked stints and sharp-tailed sandpipers and is said to be one of the few places where you can see hooded plover away from the beaches, though I didn't see any. I did however see hooded plovers on a couple of beaches on the Bellarine peninsula, especially on Thirteenth beach.

This awesome Pacific gull was feeding on a dead fish on Thirteenth beach. I guess that it's most likely a 3rd calendar year bird. Although I've seen hundreds of Pacific gulls, I've only seen this age a handful of times. Usually the gulls I see are either adults or juveniles. The bill looks even more impressive than normal on this individual.