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

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The Kelp Gull is no longer just a rarity, it is an institution. Three weeks into its stay on the Cairns Esplanade, the numbers are extraordinary: comfortably the most-reported bird in the region, logged day after day, and now pulling birders from well outside the district, tour guides among them. For a single stretch of city foreshore to hold a bird like this for this long is genuinely remarkable, and it shows no sign of moving on.

Still the gull's show

Right through the week the Kelp Gull was reported along the length of the Esplanade, northern end to southern, and from the odd balcony above the water too. The northern end at a falling tide remains the reliable spot. It has become the anchor of a busy patch, the Esplanade was again the most-watched site in the region, and a good deal of that traffic is people making the trip specifically for the gull. Not bad for a bird that belongs several thousand kilometres to the south.

Spring keeps delivering

The gull may be hogging the headlines, but the season is doing plenty behind it. The pick of the fresh arrivals was a Wandering Tattler on the northern beaches, a scarcer cousin of our common tattler and always worth a careful look. On the coast a Wedge-tailed Shearwater and a White-throated Needletail passed through, with a Tawny Grassbird, a Pied Heron and a Double-barred Finch about, and up top a Dollarbird, an Australian Tern and a Diamond Dove out towards Chillagoe. The shorebirds and aerial migrants are arriving thick and fast now, it is a fine time to be out.

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. A record-breaking gull, a scarce tattler on the beaches, and the migrants pouring in. See you Thursday.