Scaly-breasted Lorikeet Trichoglossus chlorolepidotus

Scaly-breasted Lorikeets. Used with permission by and screenshot of
  video taken 2010 by auswolf350. Copyright auswolf350.

Out of nowhere, four nights ago at 12:15AM, I heard the sounds of a flock of parrots fly over my roof top heading toward MT. McKenzie. It was pitch black outside with no moon. At first they sounded like bats but getting closer toward me I could tell they were parrots of some sort. (See the first video below for the actual recording of their flight calls). I've since identified them, by sound only, as Scaly-breasted Lorikeets. I have also visually confirmed them to be birds and not bats. Originally I estimated there were no more than 40 birds in the area.


If you cannot hear anything in this video above, turn your speakers up A LOT. Apparently their calls are very high pitched in this video.
Around 6:45PM last night I began walking toward where the birds had previously been roosting so I could be there on time as the birds came in to roost. When I got there, sure enough, the birds started coming in to roost. They began coming in to roost not as a flock but as small family groups that consisted of 12-18 individual birds.

Where the birds first roosted for the night.

However, I began to notice more and more family groups coming in to roost. They were all coming from the west of Tenterfield. I could not get close enough to the trees that some of the family groups had landed in, but it was a small stand of about 8-12 mature gum trees.

On my way home from shopping I walked the normal way home and heard a heck of a commotion coming from a small stand of trees in the Tenterfield Showgrounds. To my amazement there must have been somewhere between 200 and 400 Scaly-breasted Lorikeets roosting in the trees. The more I walked toward home the more family groups I was seeing coming in to roost.


In this video above the Scaly-breasted Lorikeets were in 6-8 of the tallest trees in the Tenterfield Showground. It was taken yesterday around 7:30PM.
There were so many birds of this species I simply could not count them. They flew at speeds more than 50 KMs per hour, as the moment I spotted them flying they were gone. They were travelling too fast for me to even record them on video.

Special thanks to auswolf350 for permitting me to use his video and screenshot to add images of these birds to this post.