A warm breeze rushed over grasses and through trees, easing unexpectedly high humidity in Townsville and its southeastern suburb of Cluden. Vilis and I joined members of the Townsville Region Bird Observers Club for an excursion through woodland alongside Stuart Creek, after which we poked around the perimeter of the city waste treatment lagoons on our own.

The morning was a quiet one for birds, although black and whistling kites soared and glided overhead, two of the latter flushing from a white ibis carcass. Rainbow lorikeets and scaly-breasted lorikeets raced through the sky from flowering tree to flowering tree, calling shrilly. At the sewage lagoons, great and little egrets hunted among reeds with white grace, joined by a white-faced heron. A pair of black-fronted dotterels – small shorebirds with red beaks and legs and prominent black V’s on their chests – skittered across small mud islands and through shallow water, followed at a distance by a lone chick so newly hatched it looked to be no more than a tiny ball of brown and white fluff suspended on disproportionately long stick-legs.

While I birded, Vilis contented himself with strolling along and photographing a new suite of natural art in shades of grey and cinnamon on trees and ground. Enjoy!

Today’s bird list: mynas, sulphur-crested cockatoos, Australian white ibises, magpie-larks, rainbow lorikeets, rainbow bee-eaters, black kites, white-bellied cuckoo-shrikes, yellow-bellied sunbirds, yellow honeyeaters, spangled drongo, peaceful doves, whistling kites, galah, scaly-breasted lorikeets, white-throated honeyeaters, black-necked stork, bush stone-curlew, leaden flycatcher, grey fantail, fairy gerygone, blue-winged kookaburra, masked lapwings, Australian magpies, welcome swallows, great egret, little egret, black-fronted dotterels, Australian pelican, white-faced heron.