I awoke this morning without a ton of energy which was just fine since it was heavily overcast and very little light as far as photography was concerned. I decided to just stay in bed and have a relaxing morning before moving on. AsI was just laying there enjoying not being up and wandering around at sunrise, I could hear a Scrub-bird in the distance. Not long after that, I could hear a Western Whipbird. Not being able to stand it, I got up and headed out after the birds.
No luck with the scrub-bird, though I did manage to see it very briefly. Much better luck with the Western Whipbird though. The taxonomy of the Western Whipbird is a bit under debate. Currently there are four seperate races, or subspecies. There is a proposal to split the three eastern races into a seperate species, the Mallee Whipbird, and leave the western race as the Western Whipbird. This is a bit confusing especially since two of teh races of the "Mallee Whipbird" are found over in South Australia and on Kangaroo Island while the third is over here as far west as Fitzgerald River National Park. This means that if the split does go through, though it is a bit controversial, I will have seen and photographed the Mallee Whipbird the other day, not in fact the Western Whipbird.
So, this morning as I set out I hoped to see and photograph this bird since it is indeed the true Western Whipbird. And see and photograph it I did. It took a bit of patience and stalking as the bird would sing from the top of the bush for about 45 seconds and then disappear for up to about 10 minutes before popping up on another bush. Fortunately, he was quite bold and let me get close enough to photograph him on at least two occasions.
The rest of the day was quite relaxing as I took shelter from the rain and mostly read and napped. It is raining again thsi evening and fairly hard so I am not sure what the weather will be like tomorrow. I was supposed to move on today to Two People's Bay where I could try again for the Noisy Scrub-bird but since I know of at least two birds here, I figured I would give it one more day and then move on to Two Peoples tomorrow.
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