Mt Gingera and the Flame Robin…
On the 29th December I headed up to Mt Gingera with Daniel, a friend from work. We set off from the My Gininni car park and walked to Pryor’s hut which is a Botanic research hut for Lindsay Pryor and botanists studying the nearby arboretum. It was about 5 km’s to this point and we stopped for some morning tea and had a look around. I had told Dan that it would be awesome for me if we found a Flame Robin which is known to in habitat the area. We set off again and eventually reached the summit of Mt Gingera for lunch which was about 7.5 km’s from the carpark and 2.5 km’s from Pryors hut. The views from the top were amazing and we could see Canberra, Black Mountain Tower and Parliament House. In the west we also saw Tantangara Dam.
It was an amazing day with a light breeze, sunny conditions and about 20 degrees Celsius. We headed off back down the mountain after lunch and a few hundred metres down the track Dan said “stop, whats that?” We saw a small bird and checked it through the binoculars and weren’t really sure what it was. Then nearby there was another small bird with an amazing orange chest which was the Flame Robin. We determined the first bird was the female ‘hen’ and the orange breasted bird was the male ‘cock’. It was amazing and we spent about 20 minutes in the area waiting for some good photo opportunities. The Robins flew to various trees and the male came quite close and did some awesome poses on a nearby branch. Seeing this bird made the day one to remember for a very long time and just what I was hoping for.
When I got home later that day I looked at the photos on my computer and they were ok but not perfect due to me only taking the 70-200mm f4 lens on my Nikon Z6ii camera. If only I had taken the 200-500mm lens but it is heavy and I wasn’t sure we would see many birds. Ill be going back again soon with the big lens. The photos below are’’t the best but I do hope you appreciate these amazing birds and I was lucky enough to capture the female feeding a chick which I didn’t realise I had photographed until I got home.
