Riviere Bleue, 8-12 August 2010
The day after getting back into Noumea I set off again on to my next stop, Riviere Bleue national park (actually it’s called a “regional park”, what with New Caledonia really being in France and all). Although Riviere Bleue is closed on Mondays I took the Yate-bound bus on the Monday to the park. There's only one bus a day to Yate and it doesn't leave Noumea till 11.30am, so I figured it would make sense to go there the day before and pitch my tent at the nearby camp-site of Les Bois du Sud so as to be on hand to enter the park first thing in the morning. The landscape in this part of New Caledonia is all red earth and dry scrubby vegetation called maquis, rather like what Mars must have looked like before the apocalypse and not at all what one expects when heading to a rainforest!
Have I mentioned how almost no tourists travel by bus? Rather inconveniently (and once again!), you can only get easily to this best-known and most-visited of the country's national parks if you have a car. From where the bus drops you off on the highway there's first a 2.4km walk to the park HQ and then a further 10km to get to Pont Perignon before you can get a shuttle for the next 10km to the camping area of Pont Germain where the kagu can be found. Why the shuttles don't just run all the way from the HQ I do not know. Fortunately, as has been said before, hitch-hiking is easy in New Caledonia, so you can usually (probably always) get a ride in some passing car to Pont Perignon.
The turn-offs to Riviere Bleue on the left and Les Bois du Sud on the right are only 150 metres apart on the highway which is handy. From the highway there's a 2 or 3 km walk to the campsite (so if walking to the park from the campsite it’s about a 5km hike to the HQ). The campsite is quite nice, with yellow-bellied robins and green-backed white-eyes begging for hand-outs and trails going off through the forest where I found some New Caledonian whistlers and fan-tailed gerygones as well as lots of streaked fantails. I could not find any white-bellied goshawks. At dawn on the Tuesday I packed up and hiked back to the highway and on to the park HQ. On the way -- just past the gate to Les Bois du Sud when coming out into the maquis -- I saw my first
New Caledonian parakeets, very much like the New Zealand red-crowned kakariki from which they've been split, but with noticeably yellower plumage. Then right near the junction of the highway and the road running to the park HQ I saw my first
barred honeyeaters and a
whistling kite, as well as various other birds I'd already seen (rainbow lorikeets, friarbirds, rufous whistler, swiftlets, etc). At the HQ I paid the surprisingly low fees (about NZ$7 entry and another NZ$7 for several nights camping), and then got a lift with a convoy of French people to Pont Perignon. They were only staying for one night but had boxes and boxes of food so I was hopeful of getting fed by them but they ended up at a different camping area from me. There is a very abrupt change of landscape on the way between Ponts Perignon and Germain. One minute you're driving through hell-blasted scrublands then in a literal blink-and-you-miss-it moment you're suddenly in thick verdant rainforest which immediately brought to mind the Gerald Durrell books I read as a boy in which he describes the West African rainforests as being underlain by gluggy red clay soils which exactly describes these New Caledonian ones as well.
Camping at Riviere Bleue is officially called "bivouacing" which means you are only allowed to have your tent up between the hours of 4pm and 8am. The rest of the time you have to pack up and just leave your belongings under one of the picnic tables. There's not much risk of theft so long as the bags are padlocked because as far as I could tell -- presumably to stop people tearing the place up in private cars -- you can only come in on the shuttle unless in a tour group, so no-one is going to nick off with your stuff in their car.
Riviere Bleue is exactly the sort of place I like when I'm travelling. Get up in the morning, go wander round the forest looking for birds, go to sleep, and then repeat the next day. That is all. Nothing else to do, and nothing to spend money on. I had already seen a lot of the endemic birds at Farino so there were only a few I was specifically looking for at Riviere Bleue, the main ones being the New Caledonian imperial pigeon, the crow honeyeater and the kagu. So after getting dropped off at Pont Germain by the shuttle I set off along the road to look for birds, of which I found plenty. The Grand Kaori trail was particularly productive, giving me my first
southern shrikebill in a bird-wave of local passerines (green-backed white-eyes, streaked fantails, fan-tailed gerygones, New Caledonian whistlers, New Caledonian flycatchers and a South Melanesian cuckoo-shrike). The shrikebill really did look a bit ridiculous amongst all the little dainty-billed passerines with the enormous secateurs it has on its face! I finally also managed to find some
New Caledonian imperial pigeons, reputedly the largest arboreal pigeon in the world (their specific name is
goliath which speaks for itself) and they really are most magnificent birds. These are actually locally-common in most of the island's forests, although declining due to hunting, and they can be heard calling where-ever you are but like many forest-dwelling pigeons they can be difficult to actually see because they spend most of each day just sitting motionless in the canopy pretending not to be there at all.
Finally for the day, after I'd set up my tent and was writing up notes, a
kagu came wandering out of the forest and started feeding on the campsite lawn. The kagu is what most visiting birders want to see in New Caledonia. They are quite rare -- about 1000 birds or so -- and over half the remaining population lives right here in Riviere Bleue. Honestly, though, the kagu was a bit of an anticlimax. It is a most peculiar bird but at the same time it has a sort of weird "familiar" look to it, looking rather like a cross between a seagull and a spur-winged plover. I thought at the time it was the 1000th bird I'd seen in the wild but it later turned out that I hadn't seen long-tailed triller before so in fact the kagu came out as number 1001 (as my list was then: taxonomic changes have shuffled it again so right now kagu sits at number 1004 while number 1000 is the New Caledonian parakeet). A kagu I found the next day in the forest - where it should be seen - was a much better experience, so I think the campground surroundings had something to do with the unexciting aspect to my first kagu. A short night walk produced a
knob-headed giant gecko up in a tree which I was most elated about. It was not the best time of year for finding geckos; apparently in summer they're all over the roads as males go searching for females.
All-in-all my most favourite bird of all the ones I saw in New Caledonia wasn't the cloven-feathered dove or the horned parakeet or the kagu; it was the
crow honeyeater. This huge black honeyeater is such a rare and reclusive bird that many birders fail to see it and so, given that I rank up there with the world's worst birders, I wouldn't have been at all surprised if I had done likewise. On the morning of my second day at the park, at about 7.30am while walking the road looking to see what was about, a harsh call attracted my attention and a big black blur shot across the road and disappeared into the forest. I knew what it had to be, mainly because I'd already seen all the other big black birds and it wasn't any of those, but at the same time it was just a whirr of feathery darkness, so it didn't get noted down as "seen: crow honeyeater". Fortunately just a couple of hours later, right near the entrance to the Grand Kaori trail, further calls alerted me to the presence of more of the birds and I found a pair of them chasing each other between the trees and got about two minutes of good stop-start viewing (that is, I'd get a good look, then the bird would fly to a different perch and I'd have to find it again for another good short view). Far and away the best bird New Caledonia has to offer in my opinion, exceeding the kagu many-fold. They're not the most attractive or colourful of birds -- in fact they're all black apart for the red facial skin that flares out in the forest gloom, they're about the size of a crow, and they have the heavy flight of a demon-spawned pheasant, looking as if they're afraid of falling out of the sky -- but they have more charisma in one primary feather than most birds do in their entire body.
Half an hour after the crow honeyeaters had departed, while I was just sitting in the little shelter by the Grand Kaori entrance out of the drizzle, one of the shuttles pulled up and dropped off a couple of Italian birders doing a birding trip of the Pacific. Their itinerary? Three days in New Caledonia, two in Samoa and two in Tonga. That's it. They had no field guides, no idea of what birds were on the islands, and no idea of sites to find the birds. Just weird. They had never heard of the grassbird or even the cloven-feathered dove, and they expressed surprise when I said they could easily find rainbow lorikeets anywhere in Noumea.
Back at the camp-site I spotted a lone fruit bat hanging in a tree on the opposite side of the river, which upped my hopes of it being the ornate flying fox
Pteropus ornatus which is both endemic and highly endangered, but I had to admit it was instead the more widespread
Pacific flying fox. I also happened to run into Francois Tran from Caledonia Tours, there with an Australian tourism journalist, and he invited me to join them for lunch. Top notch bloke he is. So instead of bread and cold sardines I had barbecued wild pig sausages, wild venison, prawns, couscous and coffee. And then he left me the left-over food as well because he didn't want to take it back with him. You can get in touch with him at
caledoniatours@lagoon.nc if you need a guide on the island.
I had been going to stay at Riviere Bleue for a few more days but seeing as how I'd found both the kagu and the crow honeyeater in double-quick time I decided to go back to Noumea early to see what else I could squeeze into my trip (not a lot as it turned out, and in retrospect I should have stayed for longer to try and find the goshawk and New Caledonian cuckoo-shrike, but oh well). Funnily enough I saw a fourth crow honeyeater the next morning while waiting for the shuttle, in a tree on the opposite bank of the river. It was a fairly distant view but the bright facial skin made it easily identifiable. There was also a New Caledonian crow in the tree which appeared to chase the honeyeater off (Francois had told me the two species really don't like one another). I made what may have been a strategic error in heading out of the park in the morning when all the visitors were coming in rather than later in the day when there was more chance of getting a lift, but it turned out fine. After no more than ten minutes walking from the shuttle drop-off I was picked up by a couple of park surveyors who took me out to the highway, and after just six minutes wait I was picked up by a passing mining truck. Hitching really is very easy in New Caledonia, even if you don't speak a lick of French. It was a good thing I left Riviere Bleue early as it happened, because yet another big storm rolled on through that night and then it rained non-stop all through the next day.
BIRDS:
38) New Caledonian parakeet Cyanoramphus saissetti
39) Barred honeyeater Glycifohia (Phylidonyris) undulatus
40) Whistling kite
Haliastur sphenurus
41) Southern shrikebill Clytorhynchus pachycephaloides pachycephaloides
42) New Caledonian imperial pigeon Ducula goliath
43) Kagu Rhynochetos jubatus
44) Crow honeyeater Gymnomyza aubryana
45) Little pied cormorant
Phalacrocorax melanoleucos melanoleucos
MAMMALS:
Pacific flying fox
Pteropus tonganus
REPTILES:
Knob-headed giant gecko Rhacodactylus auriculatus
. On a serious note: I m soo jealouse 
.
