Birdlife Southern Queensland - Darling Downs Local Branch
The first BSQDD excursion for 2025, held on 15 February, was a joint activity with Toowoomba Bird Observers at a private property beside Lockyer Creek in the Lockyer locality (between Helidon and Murphys Creek).
Main Range National Park is a massive national park in several sections, and is part of Gondwana Rainforests of Australia World Heritage Area. It is actually deceptively close to Toowoomba and we based ourselves at the Manna Gum camping ground, and surveyed a number of sites in the Goomburra Section of the park.
Key Biodiversity Areas is a global program strongly supported by BirdLife Australia (read more here); designations provide a focus for conservation effort but are not legally binding. For the past few years, the Darling Downs group of BirdLife Southern Queensland has been acting as Guardian for the Key Biodiversity Area described as Bunya Mountains and Yarraman KBA.
Surveying a new location is always fun, and that’s exactly what happened when we visited McKnight park on the side of the Toowoomba Range.
Not deterred by overcast skies and forecast showers, an intrepid team of five members of BSQDD and/or TBO undertook the first systematic group surveys of birds in the lower section of Prince Henry Drive Park on 11 May 2024.
The Queensland Conservation Council is aiming to have Deongwar State Forest permanently added to the Queensland’s conservation estate before 31st of December 2024. To assist with this a bioblitz was held on April 27th.
Today’s excursion at Prince Henry Drive was rescheduled from destinations proposed earlier, which proved unworkable at this time. As always, we enjoyed easy birding with the advantage of being able to look down on some tree tops.
Saturday the 9th of March 2024 was the Parks Week Open Day – this time at Duggan Park.
Braving dense fog (in Toowoomba) and hordes of mosquitoes on site, 11 birders visited Lake Broadwater (via Dalby) early on 10 February for the fourth excursion to this conservation park by BirdLife’s Darling Downs group.
In 2020, Lockyer Uplands Catchments Incorporated (LUCI) started a project to survey birds on properties of its members living in the upper (western) part of the Lockyer Creek catchment, South-East Queensland. The project aligned with LUCI’s strategic vision “to improve native
habitat connectivity across private and public tenures in our local landscape” and LUCI’s three objectives: raising awareness of natural systems; encouraging better land management options; and improving environmental outcomes.
Surveys were carried out by Birdlife Southern Queensland Darling Downs Branch together with the Toowoomba Bird Observers Club. This is a report on the project after the survey activities from 2021 to 2023