Thread: New arrival at Loganlea

Recently my wife Patsy and I noticed, by accident, a new resident in our yard. I say by accident because had he/she not dropped droppings on Patsy's chair out in the back yard, we would never have known it was there!
Anyhow, we looked up, as one does, and lo and behold we found our newest resident to be a Tawny Frog-mouth whom we have duly named "Hoo" . Usually these are found in reasonably stark gum trees or similar dryish grey barked trees, their feather pattern being ideally camouflaged for this situation, but in this case "Hoo" had chosen a well foliated green area.

He stayed, on and off for a couple of weeks (they apparently normally have about 4 or 5 trees they usually roost in) then one morning when we went out to check up on him he had brought home a "friend", "Hooise".

Obviously they had serious intentions on their minds as after what I considered to be a bloody short "getting to know you " period, Hoo and Hooise set about manufacturing a "nest", and I use that word that in the loosest possible way.

In the case of Tawny Frog-mouths, apparently they lay a clutch of 2-5 eggs and then it takes 30 days before incubation. They have worked out a pretty good system of management, the Male sits all day on the eggs and the Female does the night shift. While the old boy is engaged during the day light hours the Female sits around and makes herself beautiful,

watches the cat and the people with interest,

and gets ready for the night shift on the eggs whilst the Male goes out and searches for some good food, mice, frogs, lizards etc., as they are exceptionally good nocturnal hunters.
All this incubation stuff was carried out in their stable(?) nest through our violent hail storm on the 15 Dec 2010, vicious rain and wind storms, and we are pleased, if not highly surprised, to be able to say that at least one hatchling still survives this morning. Initially we thought we saw two but only the one was obvious this morning. There is still a chance that only the one was active this morning and the other "sleeping in" after all it is New Years day, and the party next door was a tad noisy!



This event has been a bit of an eye opener as this is the first time I have been able to capture the whole process on film, they are usually too far away or inaccessible.
The hatch-lings were first noted around 4-5 days ago and they tell me it takes about 4 weeks before these little blokes fledge so we have a few more weeks to go of their company.
At one stage, our daughter and son in law were around for afternoon tea and we were alerted by two marauding magpies to the fact that Hooise was sitting less than 6 feet away from 4 people, perfectly camouflaged and unphased by our proximity.
Regards
Glen

6 Jan update.
We seem to be having some itching problems with these new feathers. Doing a heck of a lot of preening.

Regards
Glen