Eastern Great Egret

 We camped at Wingan Inlet in the Croagingolong National Park in early June 2026, six and half years since the devastating 2019/20 Black Summer fires burnt out large areas of the Park including the Wingan campground. While the recovery of vegetation is significant the fauna is probably much slower to recover. 

To reach the ocean beach from the campground, a pleasant half hour walk is required, mostly around the inlet and including two sections of boardwalk. On one of these walks an Azure Kingfisher was sighted perched on a dead branch jutting out over the water and while taking a somewhat distant photo of such a small bird an Eastern Great Egret (Ardea alba modesta)(1), which was out of sight a little further along the shoreline, suddenly flushed and flew up to a perch directly above where the Kingfisher had been seconds before. As luck would have it my camera was ready giving me the opportunity to capture a sequence of front-on flight shots of this magnificent bird. 

It is not often a bird flies into the frame of your camera. Mostly careful consideration is needed for how to approach a subject to get near enough and in a suitable position for a photo without the bird taking flight.

NOTE: You can left click on any photo to open a slide show of the photos free of text or a right click enables one photo at a time to be opened in a New Tab where an enlarged version can be viewed.

The Azure Kingfisher is one of our smallest avian fish hunters, a piscivore.

The Great Egret is one of our largest avian fish hunters and is also a piscivore.

The above photos were the only ones taken with 35 seconds between the Kingfisher shot and the last photo. A lucky opportunity but not much time to capture the action. 

Note (1)

Recently the Australian and Southern Asia Great Egret populations have been separated, hence Eastern now designates the Australian sub species Ardea alba modesta. There seems to be nothing modest about the Great Egret in terms of size, however regarding the species name modesta Fraser and Gray in Australian Bird Names point out modesta comes from the Latin modestus meaning moderate, gentle, forbearing, temperate, sober, unassuming and discrete so the name aims to capture the birds demeanour/behaviour and not its size.

Immature Pacific Gull

 Early one calm overcast late autumn morning I found a surf fisher and his young daughter on the ocean beach at Lake Bunga - a short distance east of Lakes Entrance - surrounded by thirty Silver Gulls and one immature Pacific Gull (1).  I counted the gulls while recording birds for a Birdata survey. The close gathering of gulls indicated food was on offer. 

I had just counted the gulls when the Pacific Gull broke from the crowd of Silver Gulls and flew to the shoreline below where I was standing. Several Silver Gulls followed the larger Pacific Gull which had scavenged the tail end of a fish discarded by the fisher (2).  

The following time order sequence of photos shows the Pacific Gull trying to swallow the choice morsel while closely attended by two ever hopeful Silver Gulls.

NOTE: You can left click on any photo to open a slide show of the photos free of text or a right click enables one photo at a time to be opened in a New Tab where an enlarged version can be viewed.

The next shot captures the fish being dropped – a chance for the Silver Gulls to wrest the food item from the Pacific Gull.

The fish tail was quickly recovered.

Though covered in sand the Pacific Gull starts to swallow the food.

However it aborted this attempt and moved into the water where it washed the sand off.

Free of sand, the Pacific Gull now has another attempt to swallow the fish tail.

Finally after one minute from the first photo the food item is going down.

Birds always swallow fish head-first for obvious reasons. I am not sure if sand is always removed by washing. By-catch and discarded bait from human fishing, amateur or commercial, is a significant source of food for many seabirds.

Notes:

(1) The Pacific Gull fledges as a juvenile bird with dark brown feathers and bill and then moults head feathers first, which become white. The bill retains a dark tip but the rest changes to a bone colour. It takes five years to reach full adult plumage. 

(2) The fish was most likely an Australian Salmon.