Noosa River Birding - January

Yesterday I spent another perfect day out on the Noosa river helping with a survey of the birds on the sandbanks. The Noosa area was full of holiday makers! Noosa is still building and major construction is clearly visible from the river.
The best bird sighting for the day would have to be a third Beach Stone-curlew on one of the sand islands in the middle of the river. The most spectacular bird sight was definitely the thousands of terns. On the early very high tide they could only find a roost on the sandbank at the northern side of the river. Even there the waves were breaking over the sand and running over to the other side. On the low tide there were plenty of banks available and by 5 o'clock we counted over 4 thousand terns on one bank and they were flying in constantly. One member of the group counted 300 arriving in 5 minutes. Later in the evening even larger flocks came in around dark.
Migratory terns made up the largest numbers. There were numbers of Common Terns (Sterna hirundo), White-winged Black Terns (Chlidonias leucoptera), Little Terns (Sterna albifrons), Crested Terns (Sterna bergii), and a few Caspian Terns (Hydropogne caspia). It is always interesting to see different terns standing beside each other.
I have put in the names of the terns on the next two photos.
The terns in this photo were all just lifting off to fly and by chance I photographed this larger Crested Tern with the smaller Little Tern in front of its wings. Quite a size difference!