What's About: Cairns & Tablelands Birding, 17 - 23 August 2026

Last week a Common Redshank turned up on the Cairns Esplanade and set off the twitch of the year. This week the story is simpler, and rather lovely: it stayed. Eight days on, the same bird is still working the same stretch of mud, and birders are still coming from near and far to see it.

The bird that would not leave

A vagrant wader like this usually gives you a day, maybe two, before it moves on or vanishes. This one has settled in. It has now been reported every day for more than a week, confirmed by reviewers, and was still being logged on the Esplanade late on Sunday afternoon. Word has travelled well beyond Cairns, and the visitor books tell the story, birders down from interstate, guides bringing clients, and no shortage of first-timers getting a long-awaited lifer. For a bird that spends its life on the far side of the world, it has made itself very much at home on our foreshore. By week's end the northern end of the Esplanade had racked up more checklists than anywhere else in the region, the clearest sign yet of how many people made the trip.

If you have been meaning to go and have not yet, the message is simple: it is still there, and it is not shy about the northern end of the Esplanade at the right tide.

Shorebird season hits its stride

The Redshank did not arrive in a vacuum. It rode in on the leading edge of the returning shorebird migration, and this week that wave built in earnest. A Marsh Sandpiper appeared at the northern end of the Esplanade, Black-naped and Roseate Terns turned up out on the reef, and a Sooty Oystercatcher was found up at Ellis Beach. The Sanderling at the Barron River mouth carried on through the week. It is shaping up as a strong season on the coast, and the next few weeks should only add to it.

Around the region

Away from the shorebirds there was plenty about. A White-throated Gerygone and a Great Bowerbird were nice additions on the coast, and up on the Tablelands the Julatten patch, Crater Lakes and the Mount Molloy country kept ticking over. Effort eased off a little midweek with some cooler, quieter days, but the weekend brought people back out in good numbers.

Flagged as unusual by eBird

Several records were flagged as unusual by eBird over the week. As always, we treat these as provisional until they are confirmed:

• Common Redshank - reported daily, and confirmed, on the Cairns Esplanade.
• Sanderling - reported at the Barron River mouth and the Esplanade.
• Chestnut-breasted Cuckoo - reported on the Tablelands and at the Esplanade.
• Australian Boobook (red morph) - reported on the Tablelands.
• Ashy-bellied White-eye - reported from Green Island, off Cairns.

These records are flagged as unusual by eBird's automated filters and may be reviewed, corrected or withdrawn afterwards. We re-check each one against eBird before posting, but a flagged sighting is provisional until it is confirmed.

Our thanks, as ever, to everyone who got out and logged what they saw, and to the local photographers who share their shots; the whole picture is built from all of it.

That was the week around Cairns and the Tablelands. With the Redshank still in residence and the shorebirds pouring in, there has rarely been a better time to be on the coast.

Postcard from O'Reilly's, Lamington NP

A Friday arvo squeezed in between landing and check-in, so opportunistic birding at its purest: no camera, no scope, no plan, just the binos that live in the bag. Green Mountains does not care why you came, it just starts handing you birds.

Getting there is half the story. From Canungra the road climbs for the best part of an hour, winding and narrowing as the farmland gives way to rainforest, single lane in places, until you top out on the plateau at around 900 metres with the Scenic Rim falling away behind you. It feels remote because it is, and it always has been: when the O'Reilly family opened their guesthouse at Easter 1926, guests came up the mountain by packhorse, and a road did not reach the door until after the war. That guesthouse turns one hundred this year, still run by the same family, four generations on, and still carrying stories like Bernard O'Reilly's 1937 trek through the ranges to find the Stinson crash survivors. A century of welcoming people to a rainforest that was made a national park before the guesthouse even existed. You feel all of that as you drive in.

And then the birds. The Crimson Rosellas found us within minutes, running the feeding area in a red and blue scrum, at least ten of them, entirely unbothered by people. The rainforest tracks behind the lodge did the rest. Australian Logrunners, four across the walk, kicking leaf litter sideways in that odd mechanical way of theirs, always a treat for a Wet Tropics birder more used to their cousin the Chowchilla. Lewin's Honeyeaters calling until one finally showed. An Eastern Whipbird cracking away unseen, a Green Catbird wailing from the mid storey, White-browed and Yellow-throated Scrubwrens working the mossy banks, an Eastern Yellow Robin sitting quietly on a low perch the way robins do. Brushturkeys, naturally. Welcome Swallows over the clearing, an Australasian Figbird along the track, and a black bird at the forest edge that we called a crow, then a magpie, then a crow that sounded wrong, and finally left unnamed, which is sometimes the honest result.

The bird of the afternoon was a big pigeon, gleaming white with a black rear half, gliding up into the canopy. White-headed Pigeon, a Lamington specialty, and a name that wrong-foots plenty of birders: what you actually see is a lot of white bird with a dark back end, and "white-headed" is the last search term that comes to mind. It is a species we simply do not get in the Wet Tropics, which made it the pick of the day.

If you find yourself in south-east Queensland with a spare afternoon, take the winding road up. Even a quiet few hours at O'Reilly's, with no more gear than a pair of binos, out-birds a good day most places. In their centenary year, that feels exactly right.