Counting Pelicans

This year for the first time Mallacoota Inlet was included in the BirdLife Australia (BLA) Great Pelican Count.  In the past it has been restricted to the Gippsland Lakes.

My contribution was to count the Australian Pelicans on the Goodwin Sands in the middle of Bottom Lake.  The site is shown in this screengrab from Google Earth.  The NW and SE straight-line boundaries were estimated by compass bearings taken from the observation site. The SW is pretty arbitrary but as I saw no Pelicans between it and the shore it was fit for purpose. As shown in the polygon box the area in which counted Pelicans was approximately 400Ha.  The centre of the polygon is -37.5285 149.7725 and should be at sea level (allowing for tides).

This is a view of more or less the total site.  I shuffled back and forth a little to maximise the scope of my coverage (mainly to ensure there wasn't a feeding frenzy happening "just out of sight" but this shows the area the birds were lounging in.

Here's my set up.  This is at -37.5434 149.7486.  Elevation there (according to Google Earth) is 42m and it is, again according to Google Earth, about 2.8 km from the centre of the observation site.

I mainly used the telescope at 20X magnification to scan back and forth across the area, doing so every 5 minutes.  In between times I zoomed the scope (to 50x magnification) in on some areas to try to identify other species and scanned back and forth (and higher in the sky) with binoculars to see if there was ant movement going on.  There wasn't really: one bird flew out of the area and a few of them - probably 6 - swam around a bit.  

Towards the end this group of 4 decided the fishermen were poor targets (either not catching fish or not sharing them with the birds) and swam away, but stayed in the study area.

This is the main island, where I expected to get most Pelicans.  A group of 8 birds were there.  Initially they were just lounging but then stood up and wandered about a bit.

A group of about 12 Pelicans were hunkered down in te middle of this spit.  They didn't move at all as far as I could see.

The part of the sands closest to the Howe Flat area.  No Pelicans at all, as far as I could see on the island, but a couple of those that went for a swim wandered by.

My total count was 27 Pelicans.  The commonest bird that I could clearly see was Black Swan:161 birds (in the recent past I have had counts of close to 500, but possibly the greater water depth following the downpour has put the eelgrass out of reach.