Benefits of camera monitoring – another exciting observation at Eaglehawk Waterhole!

Camera Monitoring (capturing footage and images using fixed point cameras) can be a time-consuming, data-hungry technique, requiring many hours of review and verification; identifying the subject matter is not always easy either. However, as the following video shows, it can reveal some unexpected species sightings!

Andy Lines, our awesome volunteer at Eaglehawk Waterhole, has recently started capturing footage of birds visiting the bird bath at the campsite. This bird bath has been especially important to local and visiting birds, due to the extended dry period we find ourselves in this year. Andy has been setting up his SLR camera on a tripod and leaving it recording to document the birds coming and going at different times of any given day. The benefit of this is two-fold, it allows us to record the increasing variety of birds using our Eaglehawk Waterhole Restoration Reserve but also, as on this occasion, the visitation by a non-resident bird to South Australia. I am pleased to report that Andy has found another doozy. Last month we reported about a Bush-stone Curlew calling on the reserve and now we are sharing one of his finds from a camera.

Please enjoy this short video, and see if you can tell what species the mystery bird is. You can also read on below about the bird species and its migratory tendencies, which helps explain why it visited our reserve. We hope to bring more videos like this in the near future.

The honeyeater we see in this video is not a breeding resident of South Australia, but is known from southern and eastern Australia. It is recorded occasionally in SA during the autumn-early winter periods in the south-east of SA, with extralimital observations also coming from the Murray Mallee and Mt Lofty Ranges regions. It is not uncommon to find Fuscous Honeyeaters amongst flocks of migrating Yellow-faced and/or White-naped Honeyeaters during unpredictable but prominent migrations into SA. Every year massive flocks migrate up the east coast of Australia but occasionally flocks also come our way into western Victoria and south-east South Australia (SA Ornithologist, 35 (8)). Several of my fellow birdos have reported moving flocks this season, so we will celebrate in 2024 being another honeyeater migration year, well done to Andy Lines and to camera monitoring, and to there being more Fuscous Honeyeater observations in SA.