Cranes at Hasties and Fantail at Brown River

Evening all, Just back from an eight day trip to PNG with a couple of days in Cairns (trip report to follow) – had a great time, though birding is ridiculously difficult. A couple of questions about a couple of IDs. We visited Hasties Swamp near Atherton on Monday and cranes could be heard on the private land behind the swamp, but could only be vieiwed (without a scope) from the road over the hill. It is probably a long shot but does anyone have a potential ID on these – my thoughts are Sarus, based on location (and comments in Weineke) but any local knowledge would be appreciated (if both likely then I will have to leave as unknown) The other concerned a fantail seen at Brown River near Port Moresby. We were looking at a group of birds in lowland swamp forest west of Brown River with our guide Daniel Wakra, Black Thicket and Northern Fantails were present but another fantail was also there, which Daniel called as a Friendly Fantail. It wasn’t until I got back that evening that I looked at guides and this would appear to be an exceptionally low altitude for this species. The bird certainly looked like the picture in Beehler et al. and behaved much more like a typical fantail (i.e. certainly not like a Northern with much tail fanning and movement) and there were was no rufous present (the thought was possible juvenile Chestnut-bellied but this would also appear to be too high as well). The problem is no other species seems to occur at this altitude and so I was wondering if anyone has any experience with this or other species of Fantails in this are/habitat. Cheers, Peter =============================== To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send the message: unsubscribe (in the body of the message, with no Subject line) to: birding-aus-request@vicnet.net.au http://birding-aus.org ===============================