Mount Isa
I arrived in the town of Mount Isa at 10.30am. My accommodation here was the Central Point Motel which was maybe 200 metres from the Greyhound stop. This is the most expensive place I’ve stayed at on this trip, at NZ$172 per night (although it sleeps three people, so if I was in a group it would be a lot cheaper per person). There was a place “nearby” which was cheaper but it was a couple of kilometres from the bus stop and I was expecting it to be really hot here so I chose the closer one. It’s always a balance between cost and convenience, especially in places with no public transport!
Without actually working it out, I think my accommodations on this trip are probably averaging at about NZ$100 a night. The hotels have ranged between NZ$76 and this $172 one, but I have also stayed for the equivalent of two weeks in dorms with beds ranging from $46 to $67. You can probably tell from that how rates vary widely across Australian towns and cities, with the dearest dorm bed being almost as expensive as the cheapest single room (and I’m using NZ dollars because that’s what I usually book them in).
It’s worth noting as well that most of my bus rides have been overnight ones, so I have saved on hotel bills for six nights so far – and given the bus pass cost AU$799 that’s the bulk of the pass being made back on hotels let alone on the cost of the bus rides themselves.
I could check into the motel early at 11am, which is always a handy thing. It wasn’t actually as hot as I thought it would be here, so even though mid-afternoon is never a great time for birding I went out anyway because I was only here for two nights. The temperature today was 30 degrees – still hot but much less so than Pine Creek and it didn’t feel very hot, especially because there was a nice breeze most of the time. The next day was a bit hotter. The third day, however, got up to 37 degrees.
If on foot in Mount Isa the only real birding site available is the track in the hills by the water tanks at the end of Pamela Street. In particular, this is where both the Kalkadoon Grasswren and the Purple-necked Rock Wallaby can be found. Pamela Street is really close to my motel and walking to the end where the water tanks are only took twenty minutes.
I again had no camera. I turned it on to check it before leaving the motel and it was dead again. There will therefore be no bird photos in this post. Tomorrow’s post will have photos though because when I came back to the motel I managed to get the camera working with one of the “quick fixes” I mentioned earlier. The battery was half-drained despite having been fully charged yesterday and not having been used since.
Mount Isa is often described as “the Alice Springs of Queensland”, and that’s not meant as a compliment. The town has one of the highest crime rates in Queensland and I wasn’t particularly looking forward to walking around the streets. However, just like Alice Springs, there wasn’t really any sign of this. I had been warned not to go out at night, but during the day it seems okay.
I remained wary while walking to the Pamela Street water tanks this afternoon. I don’t know if this is a bad neighbourhood. Many of the houses were pretty rough, but with the effects of the heat and sun in outback towns every street looks run-down. It did look like the kind of neighbourhood where dogs might be lurking but I only saw a couple and they were behind gates.
After having sussed out the route today, the next day I was more relaxed about the walk.
At the end of Pamela Street the road suddenly becomes very steep, and then there is a barrier for cars. The paved road continues upwards past three huge water tanks (called reservoirs on the signs) and on up to the top of the hill where there are two power stations.
The hills are all very dry and rocky, almost scree-like, covered in ball-shaped clumps of spinifex grass and with scattered eucalyptus. The lower area around the water tanks has more trees than further up.
My directions for the area were that a little way after the first water tank there is a “well-defined track” to the right which leads through the hills. I think I had got this from David Andrew’s “The Complete Guide to Finding the Mammals of Australia”.
Directly after the first water tank there was a well-defined “track” which immediately turned into a very rough track as it went up a ridge. The book was published in 2015 though – a full decade ago – so for all I knew this may have been well-defined back then. In any case it was going uphill through rocks and trees, and that was good enough for me. The only bird I saw was a female Mistletoebird.
There were droppings of both rock wallabies and Euros (judging by the size difference) all over this ridge. I was continuously scanning everywhere looking for them but saw nothing. I couldn’t imagine where the rock wallabies were hiding. Well, amongst the boulders obviously, I hear you say. But there aren’t really any boulders here. There is an outcrop or two, but the slopes are largely covered in small rocks. I assumed they must be using the spinifex for cover – but that then left the puzzle of where the Euros were at because they are very large macropods.
While making my way up the ridge I had seen the actual “well-defined track” running along the bottom of it, so after reaching the top of the ridge I back-tracked a bit and then cut down the hill onto the track. The entrance to it is directly before the second water tank where the paved road curves to the right, which would have been a better description of how to find it than saying it was “x distance from the first water tank”.
The track isn’t very long. It runs by a gully alongside the ridge I was on and then splits, with the right track curling around the end of that ridge before petering out, and the left track going up the opposite slope to the paved road higher up (leading to the power stations). It turned out to be a very birdy area though, despite seeming quite desolate – there was not so much activity today in the afternoon but certainly tomorrow morning there were a lot of birds.
All the hills are covered in spinifex which looks like harmless piles of grass. But it’s not. Each blade is like a dagger, so sharp that it stabs your legs right through your trousers. If I didn’t know any better I’d think the name means something like “spine-maker”. It’s not the kind of habitat where it’s very pleasant to just go wandering off-track.
I took the right-hand fork in the track initially because I could see a big outcrop on another hill in that direction and figured there might be wallabies hiding there. Just as I started along the track a bird dashed off the side into the grass clumps. It’s kind of bewildering that spinifex is sharp enough to feel through trousers yet the birds dive straight through it, somehow without losing their eyes.
The bird had looked grasswren size, but I didn’t think my luck was that good. I kept my binoculars trained on the spot where the bird had gone in, waiting. Nothing happened. I snuck up closer until I was right beside it. I could hear the bird still in there – and then it suddenly popped out and sat on top of the spinifex singing. It was a Spinifexbird, which is a bird that lives almost solely in arid spinifex grassland. Hence the name.
The Spinifexbird remained where it was for about a minute, literally two metres away from me, then jumped up into the bare branches of a sapling where it sat for another few minutes singing. It’s true that when you don’t have a camera you get the best views of birds!
I was surprised how common the Spinifexbirds were, and also how easy they were to see! I saw three today and then another three the next day (and even got photos then, albeit not as good as they would have been of this first bird), and heard them calling all the time.
Further along the track I stayed for ages looking at that outcrop. It looked great for rock wallabies, with all sorts of crevices, but nary a one did I see. However, while watching, I saw several groups (or maybe one group coming and going) of Painted Firetails using the outcrop as a resting point. This is another bird like the Spinifexbird which is found in the arid spinifex grasslands of inland Australia, and was another bird ticked off my Mount Isa “wanted” list.
I next headed up the other track to the paved road and went to the top where as well as the two power station buildings there was a very large open area (it looked like there used to be a transmission tower there) with a view over the surrounding countryside – which was basically just flat for miles.
On the way up, while scanning the hills for wallabies, I was taken aback to see a herd of camels in the distance on the edge of the town. Surely they couldn’t be wild ones? It didn’t look like they were contained from my view, just wandering across an open field. I figured they had to be someone’s property, and sure enough when I did a Google search later they are owned by a local person.
Coming back down the road I found a third bird from my list, a Spinifex Pigeon. This was a bird I missed at Alice Springs, so I was hoping I would see it here. It is a fantastic-looking pigeon. I highly recommend googling a photo – the one at Mount Isa is the white-bellied subspecies leucogaster. The facial pattern and colour is amazing when seen close up in real life.
The pigeon flushed from beside the road as I walked by, but re-landed about three metres away from me and then just pottered about totally unconcerned. Once again I wished I had my camera with me!
Birds are all well and good but I still needed to see a Purple-necked Rock Wallaby. I had reached the lower section of the road by the second water tank, so there was nothing for it but to go back up the dirt track.
Part way up I caught a glimpse of “something” dashing behind a spinifex on the opposite slope. It had looked small and dark, maybe a grasswren I thought. I checked out the spot with my binoculars, and saw another quick movement but this time I saw it was a wallaby tail disappearing behind the next clump of grass.
I waited, and waited, but the wallaby didn’t come out the other side. I decided to go after it. Picking my way down the side of the gully and back up the other side was slow – the stony ground is unstable and the spinifex is sharp – and of course I was trying to do it quietly. When I reached the spot the wallaby had already gone, vanished via a rain-cut channel down the slope.
But then it reappeared – two of them in fact – bolting out of the grass lower down and bounding along the bed of the gully before vanishing under more spinifex. It seemed my supposition that they shelter under the spinifex rather than amongst the rocks was correct, or at least they probably do both.
Because I had no camera I didn’t bother trying to relocate them. I had seen them pretty well as they were hopping away.
I saw just 16 species of birds today:
Black Kite, Nankeen Kestrel, Feral Pigeon, Crested Pigeon, Spinifex Pigeon, Peaceful Dove, Australian Red-winged Parrot, Black-faced Cuckoo-Shrike, Spinifexbird, Magpie-Lark, White-breasted Woodswallow, Mistletoebird, Yellow-throated Miner, Painted Firetail, House Sparrow, Australian Magpie.
I arrived in the town of Mount Isa at 10.30am. My accommodation here was the Central Point Motel which was maybe 200 metres from the Greyhound stop. This is the most expensive place I’ve stayed at on this trip, at NZ$172 per night (although it sleeps three people, so if I was in a group it would be a lot cheaper per person). There was a place “nearby” which was cheaper but it was a couple of kilometres from the bus stop and I was expecting it to be really hot here so I chose the closer one. It’s always a balance between cost and convenience, especially in places with no public transport!
Without actually working it out, I think my accommodations on this trip are probably averaging at about NZ$100 a night. The hotels have ranged between NZ$76 and this $172 one, but I have also stayed for the equivalent of two weeks in dorms with beds ranging from $46 to $67. You can probably tell from that how rates vary widely across Australian towns and cities, with the dearest dorm bed being almost as expensive as the cheapest single room (and I’m using NZ dollars because that’s what I usually book them in).
It’s worth noting as well that most of my bus rides have been overnight ones, so I have saved on hotel bills for six nights so far – and given the bus pass cost AU$799 that’s the bulk of the pass being made back on hotels let alone on the cost of the bus rides themselves.
I could check into the motel early at 11am, which is always a handy thing. It wasn’t actually as hot as I thought it would be here, so even though mid-afternoon is never a great time for birding I went out anyway because I was only here for two nights. The temperature today was 30 degrees – still hot but much less so than Pine Creek and it didn’t feel very hot, especially because there was a nice breeze most of the time. The next day was a bit hotter. The third day, however, got up to 37 degrees.
If on foot in Mount Isa the only real birding site available is the track in the hills by the water tanks at the end of Pamela Street. In particular, this is where both the Kalkadoon Grasswren and the Purple-necked Rock Wallaby can be found. Pamela Street is really close to my motel and walking to the end where the water tanks are only took twenty minutes.
I again had no camera. I turned it on to check it before leaving the motel and it was dead again. There will therefore be no bird photos in this post. Tomorrow’s post will have photos though because when I came back to the motel I managed to get the camera working with one of the “quick fixes” I mentioned earlier. The battery was half-drained despite having been fully charged yesterday and not having been used since.
Mount Isa is often described as “the Alice Springs of Queensland”, and that’s not meant as a compliment. The town has one of the highest crime rates in Queensland and I wasn’t particularly looking forward to walking around the streets. However, just like Alice Springs, there wasn’t really any sign of this. I had been warned not to go out at night, but during the day it seems okay.
I remained wary while walking to the Pamela Street water tanks this afternoon. I don’t know if this is a bad neighbourhood. Many of the houses were pretty rough, but with the effects of the heat and sun in outback towns every street looks run-down. It did look like the kind of neighbourhood where dogs might be lurking but I only saw a couple and they were behind gates.
After having sussed out the route today, the next day I was more relaxed about the walk.
At the end of Pamela Street the road suddenly becomes very steep, and then there is a barrier for cars. The paved road continues upwards past three huge water tanks (called reservoirs on the signs) and on up to the top of the hill where there are two power stations.
The hills are all very dry and rocky, almost scree-like, covered in ball-shaped clumps of spinifex grass and with scattered eucalyptus. The lower area around the water tanks has more trees than further up.
My directions for the area were that a little way after the first water tank there is a “well-defined track” to the right which leads through the hills. I think I had got this from David Andrew’s “The Complete Guide to Finding the Mammals of Australia”.
Directly after the first water tank there was a well-defined “track” which immediately turned into a very rough track as it went up a ridge. The book was published in 2015 though – a full decade ago – so for all I knew this may have been well-defined back then. In any case it was going uphill through rocks and trees, and that was good enough for me. The only bird I saw was a female Mistletoebird.
There were droppings of both rock wallabies and Euros (judging by the size difference) all over this ridge. I was continuously scanning everywhere looking for them but saw nothing. I couldn’t imagine where the rock wallabies were hiding. Well, amongst the boulders obviously, I hear you say. But there aren’t really any boulders here. There is an outcrop or two, but the slopes are largely covered in small rocks. I assumed they must be using the spinifex for cover – but that then left the puzzle of where the Euros were at because they are very large macropods.
While making my way up the ridge I had seen the actual “well-defined track” running along the bottom of it, so after reaching the top of the ridge I back-tracked a bit and then cut down the hill onto the track. The entrance to it is directly before the second water tank where the paved road curves to the right, which would have been a better description of how to find it than saying it was “x distance from the first water tank”.
The track isn’t very long. It runs by a gully alongside the ridge I was on and then splits, with the right track curling around the end of that ridge before petering out, and the left track going up the opposite slope to the paved road higher up (leading to the power stations). It turned out to be a very birdy area though, despite seeming quite desolate – there was not so much activity today in the afternoon but certainly tomorrow morning there were a lot of birds.
All the hills are covered in spinifex which looks like harmless piles of grass. But it’s not. Each blade is like a dagger, so sharp that it stabs your legs right through your trousers. If I didn’t know any better I’d think the name means something like “spine-maker”. It’s not the kind of habitat where it’s very pleasant to just go wandering off-track.
I took the right-hand fork in the track initially because I could see a big outcrop on another hill in that direction and figured there might be wallabies hiding there. Just as I started along the track a bird dashed off the side into the grass clumps. It’s kind of bewildering that spinifex is sharp enough to feel through trousers yet the birds dive straight through it, somehow without losing their eyes.
The bird had looked grasswren size, but I didn’t think my luck was that good. I kept my binoculars trained on the spot where the bird had gone in, waiting. Nothing happened. I snuck up closer until I was right beside it. I could hear the bird still in there – and then it suddenly popped out and sat on top of the spinifex singing. It was a Spinifexbird, which is a bird that lives almost solely in arid spinifex grassland. Hence the name.
The Spinifexbird remained where it was for about a minute, literally two metres away from me, then jumped up into the bare branches of a sapling where it sat for another few minutes singing. It’s true that when you don’t have a camera you get the best views of birds!
I was surprised how common the Spinifexbirds were, and also how easy they were to see! I saw three today and then another three the next day (and even got photos then, albeit not as good as they would have been of this first bird), and heard them calling all the time.
Further along the track I stayed for ages looking at that outcrop. It looked great for rock wallabies, with all sorts of crevices, but nary a one did I see. However, while watching, I saw several groups (or maybe one group coming and going) of Painted Firetails using the outcrop as a resting point. This is another bird like the Spinifexbird which is found in the arid spinifex grasslands of inland Australia, and was another bird ticked off my Mount Isa “wanted” list.
I next headed up the other track to the paved road and went to the top where as well as the two power station buildings there was a very large open area (it looked like there used to be a transmission tower there) with a view over the surrounding countryside – which was basically just flat for miles.
On the way up, while scanning the hills for wallabies, I was taken aback to see a herd of camels in the distance on the edge of the town. Surely they couldn’t be wild ones? It didn’t look like they were contained from my view, just wandering across an open field. I figured they had to be someone’s property, and sure enough when I did a Google search later they are owned by a local person.
Coming back down the road I found a third bird from my list, a Spinifex Pigeon. This was a bird I missed at Alice Springs, so I was hoping I would see it here. It is a fantastic-looking pigeon. I highly recommend googling a photo – the one at Mount Isa is the white-bellied subspecies leucogaster. The facial pattern and colour is amazing when seen close up in real life.
The pigeon flushed from beside the road as I walked by, but re-landed about three metres away from me and then just pottered about totally unconcerned. Once again I wished I had my camera with me!
Birds are all well and good but I still needed to see a Purple-necked Rock Wallaby. I had reached the lower section of the road by the second water tank, so there was nothing for it but to go back up the dirt track.
Part way up I caught a glimpse of “something” dashing behind a spinifex on the opposite slope. It had looked small and dark, maybe a grasswren I thought. I checked out the spot with my binoculars, and saw another quick movement but this time I saw it was a wallaby tail disappearing behind the next clump of grass.
I waited, and waited, but the wallaby didn’t come out the other side. I decided to go after it. Picking my way down the side of the gully and back up the other side was slow – the stony ground is unstable and the spinifex is sharp – and of course I was trying to do it quietly. When I reached the spot the wallaby had already gone, vanished via a rain-cut channel down the slope.
But then it reappeared – two of them in fact – bolting out of the grass lower down and bounding along the bed of the gully before vanishing under more spinifex. It seemed my supposition that they shelter under the spinifex rather than amongst the rocks was correct, or at least they probably do both.
Because I had no camera I didn’t bother trying to relocate them. I had seen them pretty well as they were hopping away.
I saw just 16 species of birds today:
Black Kite, Nankeen Kestrel, Feral Pigeon, Crested Pigeon, Spinifex Pigeon, Peaceful Dove, Australian Red-winged Parrot, Black-faced Cuckoo-Shrike, Spinifexbird, Magpie-Lark, White-breasted Woodswallow, Mistletoebird, Yellow-throated Miner, Painted Firetail, House Sparrow, Australian Magpie.
