Some notes from Lord Howe Island – 24th -27th Feb 2011

Dear All

Stuart Warren and I just had a long weekend on Lord Howe Island. We arrived Thursday afternoon from Brisbane and returned on Sunday afternoon (home for lunch!). The weather and in particular the wind was very kind to us as the rest of the week was rough and boats were not going offshore.

We saw all the ‘normal’ land birds with Woodhens seen around the built up areas as well as more authentically or naturally in the rain forest environment on the lower slopes of Mt Ligbird. We even saw birds in the forest without their leg irons! We made no attempt to see the introduced Masked Owls.

We did 2 afternoon trips (Friday 25th Feb and Saturday 26th Feb ) with Jack Shick and Ian Hutton down to Balls Pyramid. We saw 18 species of seabird on the island 17 of which were from these trips – all 14 breeding species plus 1 White-necked Petrel (although Vanuatu Petrel was not specifically ruled out), 1 Great-winged Petrel (gouldii) and 1 light phase Pomerine Jaeger. A few Great Cormorants were seen around the coast. Providence Petrels were present in small numbers (the first of the season on the 25th) and we had 1 Little Shearwater alongside the boat on the 26th, which was a very early bird. We had good nos. – 20+ White-bellied Storm Petrels but all were light phase birds – we did not see the hoped for dark phase of this species. Kermadec Petrels were present in good nos. – 30+ (including all phases) as were Black-winged Petrels.

We spent quite a bit of time in the middle of the day and afternoon on a couple of days checking the Red-tailed Tropicbirds for the Red-billed. It is a species I am very familiar with and it was not present during our time at Kim’s Lookout and adjacent areas. According to Ian it hasn’t been seen since before Christmas when it was disturbed a number of times at its ‘nest’ area by visiting birders and a big storm came through. It may not have left for those reasons though and it will be interesting to see if it comes back next year as some seabirds have a tendency to do.

We saw the usual waders plus a couple of Wandering Tattlers and the only other vaguely unusual thing we saw was an Australia Ibis at the airport marsh yesterday. I am not sure how many records of Pomerine Jaeger there have been from Lord Howe – it is not listed in any of the literature I have.

Cheers Rob Morris

Brisbane, Australia

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