LONG WEEKEND IN MILDURA

For the Anzac Day long weekend this year, my family and I travelled to Mildura to meet up with cousins. Since there are several good birding sites in the area, I decided to visit one of them while I was there: namely, the saltbush around the suburb of Ned's Corner. On the way towards Mildura we stopped at Lake Tyrrell but didn't stay for long enough to see any birds.

Lake Tyrrell is Victoria's largest salt lake, it was beautiful in the setting sun

The area was extremely peaceful: while in the saltbush we saw only a single other car. We birded by driving slowly along, stopping when something interesting could be seen. The most prominent creatures in the saltbush were not birds, but mammals: Western grey kangaroos. Towards the end of our trip we also saw a small emu crossing the road! A variety of little birds fed in the scrub. Australasian pipits were most common, along with lifer southern whitefaces and an odd wren I'm identifying as a female white-winged fairy-wren. Where trees dotted the saltbush, we saw multiple lifer blue bonnets, though they were too distant to get any particularly good photos. On the way out we came across a gigantic flock of little corellas and galahs, along with several red-rumped parrots and crested pigeons.
We didn't have enough time to properly explore the area and it is certainly a site I will be visiting again.

Around Melbourne Western grey kangaroos are replaced by their eastern variant

A distant and blurry shot of a blue bonnet, a species of parrot found in saltbush

The lack of an eye-ring makes me believe this is a female white-winged fairy wren

Thankfully southern whitefaces are far easier to identify

Little corellas are very noisy birds and also extremely social