Blue Mountains Botanic Garden

Our group stopping to look for Australian king parrots.

This week we ducked out of the 35°C Sydney city heat to Blue Mountains Botanic Garden in Mount Tomah where it was a whole 5°C cooler. The garden is packed with diverse flora making it home to over 150 species of birds.

Smaller and shyer birds like scrubwrens and bowerbirds tend to hang around the more densely vegetated areas. So if you don't see any birds at first, it's worth standing still at one spot to wait for the birds to come to you. Looping through the gardens at different times of the day also helps.

Highlights from the trip are spotting an Australian king parrot, satin bowerbird and its blue nest, and a superb lyrebird! For many of us, it was our first time seeing and hearing a lyrebird mimic other bird calls. Its mimicry was so good that by the end, we just assumed any bird calls we couldn't identify to be a lyrebird 😛. See how many calls you can count in the video below.

Superb Lyrebird mimicking other bird calls.

Species spotted (our group's first sightings in bold):

Australian King-Parrot
Australian Magpie
Crimson Rosella
Eastern Spinebill
Eastern Whipbird
Eurasian Blackbird
Laughing Kookaburra
Little Wattlebird
Pied Currawong
Satin Bowerbird
Superb Lyrebird
White-throated Treecreeper
and lots of mosquitoes!!!

Today's "Myna of the day" (the most spotted species during the outing) is the Crimson Rosella.