LaughingDove Goes Travelling - SE Asia and Australia
- Thread starter LaughingDove
- Start date
Didn't see one there, is it signed obviously? If it is unsigned then I would probably not have seen it as the zoo was almost closing when I got around to there.
Unfortunately I can't drive so a hire car isn't an option for me.
I knew you had somehow managed to get to Dryandra by public transport and I was actually going to ask in the PM thread so thanks for this. The other thing I want to do is spend a couple of nights on Rottnest. I've only ever been for day trips in the past.
Kakadu was busy at a couple of spots at the sorts of places where tourists gather like the art sites and the wetlands cruise, but Kakadu is vast. It would take a lot for it to get busy.
It's difficult to make a comparison with 'the Bornean parks'. Places like the Rainforest Discovery Centre were relatively busy per unit of land and the Kinabatangan was quite busy too primarily because I was on a tour which goes to the standard tour areas. Danum and Mount Kinabalu were not busy once I got away from the main area and at Crocker Range I was the only person there.
Yes. I should have something that's decent enough to upload when I get around to it.
Just check some bus schedules to make sure there's one still going along that highway (the name of the town is in the post after the Dryandra one, I forget the name now, or have a look on a map), and then email the Lions Village to see if it is still possible for a pick-up (I'm not sure if the caretakers are still the same people or not, and other such variables). Also, obviously, it was seven years ago so there may be an easier version of getting there by now!
Well it wasn't so much an analogy as just a lame joke, but I know what you mean. It's like having to pronounce an animal's name incorrectly so people won't think that you are the idiot (e.g. in New Zealand chamois is routinely pronounced "shamee" like the thing you clean your car with - if I were to pronounce it as chamois the only response is confusion), or when I'm in India and have to call a Gaur a "bison" which really grits my teeth.
Down At the Water Hole
About 30km to the south of the town of Pine Creek along the Stuart Highway towards Katherine is the Fergusson River which runs under the highway. In the wet season it’s a proper river, but in the dry season (which is now) the river doesn’t flow and is reduced to a series of pools which are the only real water source for miles. I had heard that this was a particularly good spot to see birds at dawn coming down to drink and before leaving Pine Creek we went down to have a look at the river at dawn. My primary target being the elusive Gouldian Finch with other species like cockatiels being targets too.
There were lots of finches coming down to drink: Double-barred, Masked, Crimson, and Long-tailed. And various other birds as well. Then suddenly, as I was looking at the various finches a flash of colour and three Gouldian Finches appeared! I couldn’t quite believe my eyes. Three actual live Gouldian Finches right there! They showed really nicely flying up and down between some overhanging paperbark trees and a little beach area by the water before flying off. I even managed to get some pictures of them along with the group of masked finches that they were hanging out with. Really lovely sighting. Amazing stuff. I genuinely thought I would miss Gouldian Finches, they’re just so sparsely distributed and nomadic that they’re really quite difficult to actually find so I’m extremely pleased to have seen this group of three.
I did see another kind of finch as well, but I didn’t see it clearly enough to be sure of what it was. I suspect maybe Star Finch, but there were just heaps of finches around (and of course when I say finches here, I’m aware that they’re all waxbills and I actually really like waxbills. A little bit later a couple who were camping a bit further down the river to collect some pots that they had left to trap freshwater prawns and said that there was a Freshwater Crocodile that lived up the river a bit. I had seen plenty of saltwaters, but I rather liked the idea of seeing a freshwater so I went up the river and found the rather large pool where it lived. It was very wary and wouldn’t stay visible at the surface for very long at all, but nice to see. There were loads of archerfish in the water too which are cool. No Cockatiels showed up that morning which would have been a nice bird to see; I quite like the idea of seeing common aviary pet birds in the wild like the Gouldians. But I’m not complaining, that Gouldian sighting was amazing.
After a couple of hours birding at the ‘river’ we headed back to Pine Creek to check out, but before leaving the town I had another look in the park in the middle of town to see the Hooded Parrots again. This time, I found them roosting and feeding a bit in one of the trees and there was a male and two females. They just sat there, moving around along the branches a little bit and posed perfectly for great views and ideal pictures, better than the ones on the ground yesterday. So that was really nice.
Our next stop was another onen-night stay at Litchfield National Park which is along the road back to Darwin (and after this I have a couple of days more in Darwin before flying on to Cairns). Litchfield is not a park that normally features on the birding radar much and birders don’t generally visit because it lacks many of the endemics of Kakadu and has similar birds to sites around Darwin itself. This was a stop because Litchfield National Park is a place that my aunt particularly wanted to visit and it is a park that’s know for two things, both of which are quite cool. They are: the huge impressive waterfalls that fall a long distance off the sandstone massif that dominates Litchfield National Park, as well as the Magnetic Termite Mounds. The latter are a huge long row of termite mounds stretching out into the distance that are flat in shape and all oriented in the same way such that they avoid getting heated by the sun too much. Both are pretty cool things to see, and of course all the usual bush birds are here just like any bit of bush in the area. Red-winged Parrots are particularly common flying around and they are wonderful birds. (It’s probably worth noting that Litchfield does sometimes feature when it comes to mammalwatching because there’s a population of threatened Orange Leaf-nosed bats that roosts in the cave behind Tomer Falls but the roost site is closed to the public to protect the bats. You can see them, but you’ve got to be in the area around the cave after dark for that and it’s 45km into the park so I won’t be able to get them).
I considered trying spotlighting in the area around my accommodation which is a few kms outside the park entrance, but most of the area around is private property for cattle ranching and just walking briefly around I think the only thing around are heaps of cane toads. This particular open woodland type habitat that so dominates the area really has been obliterated by cane toads.
New birds:
Yellow-tinted Honeyeater
Gouldian Finch
Long-tailed finch
Hooded Robin
Crested Pigeon
About 30km to the south of the town of Pine Creek along the Stuart Highway towards Katherine is the Fergusson River which runs under the highway. In the wet season it’s a proper river, but in the dry season (which is now) the river doesn’t flow and is reduced to a series of pools which are the only real water source for miles. I had heard that this was a particularly good spot to see birds at dawn coming down to drink and before leaving Pine Creek we went down to have a look at the river at dawn. My primary target being the elusive Gouldian Finch with other species like cockatiels being targets too.
There were lots of finches coming down to drink: Double-barred, Masked, Crimson, and Long-tailed. And various other birds as well. Then suddenly, as I was looking at the various finches a flash of colour and three Gouldian Finches appeared! I couldn’t quite believe my eyes. Three actual live Gouldian Finches right there! They showed really nicely flying up and down between some overhanging paperbark trees and a little beach area by the water before flying off. I even managed to get some pictures of them along with the group of masked finches that they were hanging out with. Really lovely sighting. Amazing stuff. I genuinely thought I would miss Gouldian Finches, they’re just so sparsely distributed and nomadic that they’re really quite difficult to actually find so I’m extremely pleased to have seen this group of three.
I did see another kind of finch as well, but I didn’t see it clearly enough to be sure of what it was. I suspect maybe Star Finch, but there were just heaps of finches around (and of course when I say finches here, I’m aware that they’re all waxbills and I actually really like waxbills. A little bit later a couple who were camping a bit further down the river to collect some pots that they had left to trap freshwater prawns and said that there was a Freshwater Crocodile that lived up the river a bit. I had seen plenty of saltwaters, but I rather liked the idea of seeing a freshwater so I went up the river and found the rather large pool where it lived. It was very wary and wouldn’t stay visible at the surface for very long at all, but nice to see. There were loads of archerfish in the water too which are cool. No Cockatiels showed up that morning which would have been a nice bird to see; I quite like the idea of seeing common aviary pet birds in the wild like the Gouldians. But I’m not complaining, that Gouldian sighting was amazing.
After a couple of hours birding at the ‘river’ we headed back to Pine Creek to check out, but before leaving the town I had another look in the park in the middle of town to see the Hooded Parrots again. This time, I found them roosting and feeding a bit in one of the trees and there was a male and two females. They just sat there, moving around along the branches a little bit and posed perfectly for great views and ideal pictures, better than the ones on the ground yesterday. So that was really nice.
Our next stop was another onen-night stay at Litchfield National Park which is along the road back to Darwin (and after this I have a couple of days more in Darwin before flying on to Cairns). Litchfield is not a park that normally features on the birding radar much and birders don’t generally visit because it lacks many of the endemics of Kakadu and has similar birds to sites around Darwin itself. This was a stop because Litchfield National Park is a place that my aunt particularly wanted to visit and it is a park that’s know for two things, both of which are quite cool. They are: the huge impressive waterfalls that fall a long distance off the sandstone massif that dominates Litchfield National Park, as well as the Magnetic Termite Mounds. The latter are a huge long row of termite mounds stretching out into the distance that are flat in shape and all oriented in the same way such that they avoid getting heated by the sun too much. Both are pretty cool things to see, and of course all the usual bush birds are here just like any bit of bush in the area. Red-winged Parrots are particularly common flying around and they are wonderful birds. (It’s probably worth noting that Litchfield does sometimes feature when it comes to mammalwatching because there’s a population of threatened Orange Leaf-nosed bats that roosts in the cave behind Tomer Falls but the roost site is closed to the public to protect the bats. You can see them, but you’ve got to be in the area around the cave after dark for that and it’s 45km into the park so I won’t be able to get them).
I considered trying spotlighting in the area around my accommodation which is a few kms outside the park entrance, but most of the area around is private property for cattle ranching and just walking briefly around I think the only thing around are heaps of cane toads. This particular open woodland type habitat that so dominates the area really has been obliterated by cane toads.
New birds:
Yellow-tinted Honeyeater
Gouldian Finch
Long-tailed finch
Hooded Robin
Crested Pigeon
Back Into the City, Looking Out Towards The Sea (+Crocosaurus Cove)
We started the morning with a quick pop back into Litchfield National Park to look around a bit and see if there was anything interesting about. The most interesting thing for me was that near one of the big waterfalls (Wangi Falls) there was a trail going through a small patch of monsoon forest where the trees above were absolutely filled with Black Flying Foxes. Hundreds of them, possibly into the thousands, making a huge amount of noise, showering the ground below with droppings (though I didn’t get hit) and just making a spectacular sight. I also finally managed to get a picture of Red-winged Parrots. I’ve been seeing them flying around and they are stunning in flight over the road, but today was my first view of them perched.
We then checked out of the accommodation and headed to Darwin which isn’t very far at all from Litchfield National Park, just over 100km (it’s a fairly popular day trip site). We were in Darwin by about midday and then went out for lunch in the city centre. Just across the road, I then noticed that we had ended up in a restaurant directly opposite Crocosaurus Cove. This is a small zoo-type thing and mainly focuses on being a croc experience for locals and also claims to have the world’s largest collection of Australian reptiles. I had decided that this place wasn’t really worth visiting and that my priorities zoo-wise in the Darwin area would be the Territory Wildlife Park (which I visited near the start of the trip) and possibly fitting in Crocodylus Park if I had a free afternoon (on the cards for tomorrow) which I believe is a fairly typical zoo place with some exotics and natives and worth visiting because I like seeing new zoos. Crocosaurus Cove (note: this is a different place to Crocodylus Park, the names are confusingly similar) though I decided I would skip on this trip, except it was right there, across the road and, well… I decided to visit anyway. At $35 dollars per person, the fee is a bit steep for a place that quite literally occupies a single small city block in the centre of Darwin but I thought I would give it a look in. I was pleasantly surprised.
Crocosaurus Cove is right in the centre of Darwin in the main touristy area and is very small, but they have spread upwards over three levels to make the most of the small city block. The place focuses exclusively on native Australian and especially Top End of NT reptiles with the main attraction being crocs. There is an aquarium (as in, one tank) with various large native fishes, a pretty big reptile house for smaller reptiles and lots of tanks with crocodiles. There are about half a dozen absolutely massive Saltwater Crocodiles each in a little pool thing, as well as several hundred small Saltwater Crocodiles. Hmm… the numbers certainly don’t add up there because small salties grow into big salties. I think the large shop selling a variety of crocodile leather products at the entrance area provides a clue as to the fate of the small and medium sized crocodiles.
The other thing that I didn’t like about the place were the hundreds of people lined up to take a photograph of themselves holding a baby crocodile with the same crocodiles being held by hundreds of people holding them and playing with them and standing in front of a professional photographer person with a flash all day.
The large crocodile pools are not particularly large but certainly not tiny and they all have underwater viewing and crystal clear water. The pond with hundreds of small to medium sized crocs had underwater viewing and crystal clear water too which suggests some hefty filtration systems. However what makes the place worth visiting is the reptile house. It is really, really impressive. Unlike the rest of the zoo which is all commercial and tacky and appealing to a kind of irritating show the tourists the big vicious crocs type vibe, the reptile house was really nicely done. Good educational signage, all very well kept and classy looking and finished to a high standard and all the enclosures were really good too. Decently big, especially by the standard of reptile holdings, and nice looking. The reptile house would not feel out of place in any major top zoo. Now that’s all very nice, but why was I so blown away by it? Quite simply, the size of the collection. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a large collection of Australian reptiles. By my count, they have about 57 species of native Australian reptiles (+/- a few because of double ups and I tried to count them all but lost track of what species I had already counted). Yes, really, more than fifty species of native Australian reptiles, almost all top-end reptiles. So many goannas/monitors, three species of velvet gecko, the collection just went on and on as I went down the windy corridor through the reptile house and as I just kept seeing more and more native Australian reptiles I was just amazed. It’s a huge collection, rather stamp collecty really, but all the enclosures are just to such a high standard! And there was an incubator with various eggs on show, off display breeding areas. Just a really impressive reptile house! They even have what they claim is an undescribed species of goanna.
They do claim to have the world’s largest collection of native Australian reptiles, and I just passed that off of as them having 300 crocs and calling in the largest collection, but it really is a very nice reptile collection indeed!
After a couple of hours at Crocosaurus Cove after which I had seen the reptile collection to my satisfaction, we headed on to the evening birding destination: Casuarina Coastal Reserve and the two regular sites on the Darwin birding circuit of Buffalo Creek and Lee Point. Buffalo Creek is a mangrove-lined creek where all the birders visit to try and find Chestnut Rail which is supposed to be possible here and Lee Point has some rocks where Beach Stone-curlews are sometimes found, both of these would be wonderful birds to see. To save me the effort of pointlessly building up some vague attempt at suspense like I try to do sometimes: I saw neither of those species. This is pretty much the first total dip on this Darwin trip when it comes to target birds so I can’t complain. A major factor in this is that it was a Sunday and fairly busy.
There were a few waders around though in the area, mostly too far away to actually identify but I saw a couple of species well enough to ID. The most exciting thing though was out at sea. There are dugongs here that feed on the seagrass beds, but I didn’t see any dugongs. Instead, there were absolutely loads of dolphins! Several pods, frolicking in the bay regularly surfacing, even occasionally jumping clearly out of the water. It’s normally very difficult to identify cetaceans and to see them properly from land, but these were not far out at all and there were quite large numbers that were active in the same area regularly coming up and showing themselves. There are three species of dolphins that are resident in the Darwin area and have the potential to be seen: Snub-finned Dolphin, Australian Humpback Dolphin and Indo-Pacific Bottlenose. The dolphins I could see definitely included the latter two species which is really cool. The Humpback especially. The dolphins jumping clear out of the water made me suspect Spinner Dolphins at one point which is possibly but unlikely so close to the coast but I think they were just the bottlenosed being very jumpy. I knew dolphins were theoretically possible in the Darwin area but I never expected to actually see any, so I’m very happy with those sightings this afternoon/evening.
Tomorrow I have another full day in Darwin with my aunt and we’re returning the hire car in the afternoon, and then I have the day after that here in Darwin on my own before my flight to Cairns the next morning.
New birds:
Golden-backed (Black-chinned) Honeyeater
Mangrove Robin
Eastern Curlew
Whimbrel
Bar-tailed Godwit
Caspian Tern
Red-capped Plover
Mammals:
Indo-pacific Bottlenose Dolphin
Australian Humpback Dolphin
We started the morning with a quick pop back into Litchfield National Park to look around a bit and see if there was anything interesting about. The most interesting thing for me was that near one of the big waterfalls (Wangi Falls) there was a trail going through a small patch of monsoon forest where the trees above were absolutely filled with Black Flying Foxes. Hundreds of them, possibly into the thousands, making a huge amount of noise, showering the ground below with droppings (though I didn’t get hit) and just making a spectacular sight. I also finally managed to get a picture of Red-winged Parrots. I’ve been seeing them flying around and they are stunning in flight over the road, but today was my first view of them perched.
We then checked out of the accommodation and headed to Darwin which isn’t very far at all from Litchfield National Park, just over 100km (it’s a fairly popular day trip site). We were in Darwin by about midday and then went out for lunch in the city centre. Just across the road, I then noticed that we had ended up in a restaurant directly opposite Crocosaurus Cove. This is a small zoo-type thing and mainly focuses on being a croc experience for locals and also claims to have the world’s largest collection of Australian reptiles. I had decided that this place wasn’t really worth visiting and that my priorities zoo-wise in the Darwin area would be the Territory Wildlife Park (which I visited near the start of the trip) and possibly fitting in Crocodylus Park if I had a free afternoon (on the cards for tomorrow) which I believe is a fairly typical zoo place with some exotics and natives and worth visiting because I like seeing new zoos. Crocosaurus Cove (note: this is a different place to Crocodylus Park, the names are confusingly similar) though I decided I would skip on this trip, except it was right there, across the road and, well… I decided to visit anyway. At $35 dollars per person, the fee is a bit steep for a place that quite literally occupies a single small city block in the centre of Darwin but I thought I would give it a look in. I was pleasantly surprised.
Crocosaurus Cove is right in the centre of Darwin in the main touristy area and is very small, but they have spread upwards over three levels to make the most of the small city block. The place focuses exclusively on native Australian and especially Top End of NT reptiles with the main attraction being crocs. There is an aquarium (as in, one tank) with various large native fishes, a pretty big reptile house for smaller reptiles and lots of tanks with crocodiles. There are about half a dozen absolutely massive Saltwater Crocodiles each in a little pool thing, as well as several hundred small Saltwater Crocodiles. Hmm… the numbers certainly don’t add up there because small salties grow into big salties. I think the large shop selling a variety of crocodile leather products at the entrance area provides a clue as to the fate of the small and medium sized crocodiles.
The other thing that I didn’t like about the place were the hundreds of people lined up to take a photograph of themselves holding a baby crocodile with the same crocodiles being held by hundreds of people holding them and playing with them and standing in front of a professional photographer person with a flash all day.
The large crocodile pools are not particularly large but certainly not tiny and they all have underwater viewing and crystal clear water. The pond with hundreds of small to medium sized crocs had underwater viewing and crystal clear water too which suggests some hefty filtration systems. However what makes the place worth visiting is the reptile house. It is really, really impressive. Unlike the rest of the zoo which is all commercial and tacky and appealing to a kind of irritating show the tourists the big vicious crocs type vibe, the reptile house was really nicely done. Good educational signage, all very well kept and classy looking and finished to a high standard and all the enclosures were really good too. Decently big, especially by the standard of reptile holdings, and nice looking. The reptile house would not feel out of place in any major top zoo. Now that’s all very nice, but why was I so blown away by it? Quite simply, the size of the collection. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a large collection of Australian reptiles. By my count, they have about 57 species of native Australian reptiles (+/- a few because of double ups and I tried to count them all but lost track of what species I had already counted). Yes, really, more than fifty species of native Australian reptiles, almost all top-end reptiles. So many goannas/monitors, three species of velvet gecko, the collection just went on and on as I went down the windy corridor through the reptile house and as I just kept seeing more and more native Australian reptiles I was just amazed. It’s a huge collection, rather stamp collecty really, but all the enclosures are just to such a high standard! And there was an incubator with various eggs on show, off display breeding areas. Just a really impressive reptile house! They even have what they claim is an undescribed species of goanna.
They do claim to have the world’s largest collection of native Australian reptiles, and I just passed that off of as them having 300 crocs and calling in the largest collection, but it really is a very nice reptile collection indeed!
After a couple of hours at Crocosaurus Cove after which I had seen the reptile collection to my satisfaction, we headed on to the evening birding destination: Casuarina Coastal Reserve and the two regular sites on the Darwin birding circuit of Buffalo Creek and Lee Point. Buffalo Creek is a mangrove-lined creek where all the birders visit to try and find Chestnut Rail which is supposed to be possible here and Lee Point has some rocks where Beach Stone-curlews are sometimes found, both of these would be wonderful birds to see. To save me the effort of pointlessly building up some vague attempt at suspense like I try to do sometimes: I saw neither of those species. This is pretty much the first total dip on this Darwin trip when it comes to target birds so I can’t complain. A major factor in this is that it was a Sunday and fairly busy.
There were a few waders around though in the area, mostly too far away to actually identify but I saw a couple of species well enough to ID. The most exciting thing though was out at sea. There are dugongs here that feed on the seagrass beds, but I didn’t see any dugongs. Instead, there were absolutely loads of dolphins! Several pods, frolicking in the bay regularly surfacing, even occasionally jumping clearly out of the water. It’s normally very difficult to identify cetaceans and to see them properly from land, but these were not far out at all and there were quite large numbers that were active in the same area regularly coming up and showing themselves. There are three species of dolphins that are resident in the Darwin area and have the potential to be seen: Snub-finned Dolphin, Australian Humpback Dolphin and Indo-Pacific Bottlenose. The dolphins I could see definitely included the latter two species which is really cool. The Humpback especially. The dolphins jumping clear out of the water made me suspect Spinner Dolphins at one point which is possibly but unlikely so close to the coast but I think they were just the bottlenosed being very jumpy. I knew dolphins were theoretically possible in the Darwin area but I never expected to actually see any, so I’m very happy with those sightings this afternoon/evening.
Tomorrow I have another full day in Darwin with my aunt and we’re returning the hire car in the afternoon, and then I have the day after that here in Darwin on my own before my flight to Cairns the next morning.
New birds:
Golden-backed (Black-chinned) Honeyeater
Mangrove Robin
Eastern Curlew
Whimbrel
Bar-tailed Godwit
Caspian Tern
Red-capped Plover
Mammals:
Indo-pacific Bottlenose Dolphin
Australian Humpback Dolphin
I do have the notes to do a species list for Crocosaurus Cove if enough people are interested (or there may be one on ZooChat already, I don't know).
If anyone is interested, then I can fit in doing it at some point in the next few weeks, probably from Perth. 'Like' this post or something if you want me to prioritise doing a species list (but only if you actually want one, otherwise I'll spend more time uploading pictures etc.)
If anyone is interested, then I can fit in doing it at some point in the next few weeks, probably from Perth. 'Like' this post or something if you want me to prioritise doing a species list (but only if you actually want one, otherwise I'll spend more time uploading pictures etc.)
Owls Don’t Actually Exist (+Crocodylus Park)
As everyone knows, owls don’t actually exist. They’re a myth invented just to annoy birders and to get them to stare at empty patches of vegetation where these mythical owls roost. Anyway, we started with an early morning visit to the Darwin Esplanade which isn’t particularly birdy being a pretty well manicured stretch of grass that overlooks the sea. But at the end of it near some steps that go down to the beach is a big patch of trees where the internet says that a family of Barking Owls roost. Obviously, they weren’t there or at least weren’t visible. A passing jogger said that the owls could sometimes be seen flying in before dawn when it’s still dark. But obviously she was just part of the conspiracy since owls don’t actually exist.
We couldn’t spend long looking for the Barking Owls that morning. I know they don’t actually exist but I just wanted to make sure, and I checked the trees thoroughly enough to make sure that the owls weren’t obvious at least, it’s not a big patch of vegetation. We couldn’t look for too long because I had to go back to the doctor to follow up about my dysentery from the start of my time in Darwin. I was better though as I had finished the antibiotics course and it had completely cured. The tests showed I had a bacterial infection, as expected, although it turned out I was given the wrong antibiotics for the type of bacterium that it actually ended up being (I was given a kind of antibiotics which many strains of that particular bacterium are resistant too so it’s not usually used) but luckily it seemed to work regardless.
That didn’t take long especially because I am, you know, better so going to a doctor is basically pointless but after that we headed for a visit to a birding site called Holmes Jungle Nature Park. It’s a remnant patch of natural vegetation in the Darwin suburbs and is largely dominated by tall grassland. There are buttonquails here but they’re difficult to see because they mostly just stay in the tall grass and you have to be very lucky to be in the right place when one crossed a path, and lots of finches too including Crimsons and Double-barreds and only my second view and first photo of a Long-tailed Finch. I saw some Zitting Cisticolas too which are uncommon in Australia. Holmes Jungle Nature Park is also supposed to be a good site for Eastern Grass Owls which apparently can often be seen hunting above the grasslands during the day in the mornings. Owls don’t actually exist though so I didn’t see any.
Holmes Jungle Nature Park is right next to Crocodylus Park which is where we went to next. This is a medium sized zoo in the Darwin suburbs with both natives and exotics and they specialise in crocs, hence the name. With this zoo visit, that makes the third zoo on this Top End trip which isn’t bad for an eleven day trip and although I had hoped to get to all three zoos, I thought I would probably only make it to Territory Wildlife Park. Most of the enclosures at the zoo are small and unremarkable, at least for everything except the crocs. They’ve got a variety of extremely common native birds, reptiles, and mammals, and a few exotics that are probably unusual for Australia with four species of primates, Maned Wolves, and three species of cat. Nicely laid out though in a small plot and worth popping into. The crocs are what makes the place more interesting though as they breed them here and breed hundreds. They have a row of about twenty breeding pens, each with a pair of huge Saltwater Crocs, some absolutely massive males too and a leucistic saltie, and of course lots of pools with young ones of different sizes ranging from just bigger than hatchlings to almost ready for handbags in size. They’re not shy about the fate of the crocs though, and they sell lots of crocodile leather and crocodile meat in the shop, the latter in the restaurant/café too. I think that is much better than pretending all the baby crocs live happily ever after.
They actually hold several species of crocodilian, beyond just loads of salties and a few freshies like Australian crocodile places tend to do. They also have American Alligators and, surprisingly for me because I wasn’t expecting either of these species, Philippine Crocodiles and New Guinea Crocodiles. Quite a few of the latter species, presumably they are trying to breed them. I wonder where they got those two species from? New Guinea Crocodiles in particular are not at all common in captivity and I don’t believe I’ve seen them before. Direct imports?
Crocodylus Park also does boat cruises on the nearby river where they see sort-of-wild (relocated) crocs and probably some common waterbirds, but you had to pay extra so I didn’t do that. I enjoyed visiting the place, well worth a few hours, and I like going to zoos anyway, especially new ones that have some kind of unusual feature. Oh, and they’ve got a rather impressive crocodile museum too with lots of quite interesting biological, cultural and conservation displays.
After Crocodylus Park since we got there early enough (none of these distances driven today are far at all) we headed to the Botanic Gardens for a proper visit. The one thing I wanted to see here was, you guessed it, a mythical imaginary owl. This is supposed to be the easiest and most reliable place anywhere to see a Rufous Owl (though I have actually seen one before two years ago near Cairns) because there is at least one or usually a pair that roosts here and they are supposed to be easy enough to locate. There is a small rainforest walk and they’re supposed to roost in the trees there or alternatively they apparently roost in the trees near the toilet block. But as I’ve said owls don’t exist. All the websites and guides tell you to just stare at the darkest bits of the trees and then you see the owls. Yeah, that’s definitely a ploy to have birders standing there staring at nothing for hours. I had a couple of hours at the botanic gardens, no owls.
So we then had to return the hire car that late afternoon so we did that and then walked from there back to the esplanade because despite being sure that owls don’t exist by this point, I still wanted to stare at some trees where Barking Owls definitely don’t roost for a few hours before dinner. Because the trees are right by some narrow stairs going from the upper esplanade level to the beach I had to basically stand right in the middle of a busy path to look for the owls, just staring at nothing with my binoculars. I did this for about two and a half hours, just up and down the same 30m of staircase at the same tiny patch of trees, but very dense trees. I would have given up earlier since owls don’t exist, but I did hear one short sequence of Barking Owl hoots and they’re distinctive so there’s no mistaking those. Someone has gone to the effort of hiding a tape recorder with Barking Owl calls in the trees too. All the locals seem to be in on the myth though, because a few people knew I was looking for the owls.
Then, to my shock and surprise, almost three hours on those damn stairs staring at trees for non-existent owls, there was one! It just sat there, perfectly still, with its eyes closed. Now that I’ve seen it, it would be very easy to direct anyone to it. Just look in the darkest bits of the trees… hmm. Anyway, the Barking Owl sat there, slightly opened its eyes, then closed them again. Then in a sudden burst of energy lifted a leg and sort of scratched its head then went back to sleep. The good thing about owl day roosts is that its walk-away views guaranteed. Must be a very realistic animatronic owl that someone put in that tree. If I didn’t know any better, I would almost say it was a real live owl.
That makes only the third owl species in two months on this trip so far. Three owls is better than no owls though, and I see owls at day roosts even less frequently than I see owls at night (both the other two were at night). I have another full day in Darwin tomorrow before leaving for Cairns the next morning, but I’m on my own without a car so limited to where I can get to by bus (i.e. this is Australia so nowhere at all) and where I can walk to and since a 4km walk is no problem for me, I can get to the botanic gardens to try again for Rufous Owl and possibly get to some mangroves to have another go at Chestnut Rail. Apart from those and Beach Stone-Curlew I’ve pretty much seen all of my main targets, which isn’t bad at all so I’m overall very pleased with having managed to get so much wildlife and to get to three zoos on top of that.
New bird:
Barking Owl
As everyone knows, owls don’t actually exist. They’re a myth invented just to annoy birders and to get them to stare at empty patches of vegetation where these mythical owls roost. Anyway, we started with an early morning visit to the Darwin Esplanade which isn’t particularly birdy being a pretty well manicured stretch of grass that overlooks the sea. But at the end of it near some steps that go down to the beach is a big patch of trees where the internet says that a family of Barking Owls roost. Obviously, they weren’t there or at least weren’t visible. A passing jogger said that the owls could sometimes be seen flying in before dawn when it’s still dark. But obviously she was just part of the conspiracy since owls don’t actually exist.
We couldn’t spend long looking for the Barking Owls that morning. I know they don’t actually exist but I just wanted to make sure, and I checked the trees thoroughly enough to make sure that the owls weren’t obvious at least, it’s not a big patch of vegetation. We couldn’t look for too long because I had to go back to the doctor to follow up about my dysentery from the start of my time in Darwin. I was better though as I had finished the antibiotics course and it had completely cured. The tests showed I had a bacterial infection, as expected, although it turned out I was given the wrong antibiotics for the type of bacterium that it actually ended up being (I was given a kind of antibiotics which many strains of that particular bacterium are resistant too so it’s not usually used) but luckily it seemed to work regardless.
That didn’t take long especially because I am, you know, better so going to a doctor is basically pointless but after that we headed for a visit to a birding site called Holmes Jungle Nature Park. It’s a remnant patch of natural vegetation in the Darwin suburbs and is largely dominated by tall grassland. There are buttonquails here but they’re difficult to see because they mostly just stay in the tall grass and you have to be very lucky to be in the right place when one crossed a path, and lots of finches too including Crimsons and Double-barreds and only my second view and first photo of a Long-tailed Finch. I saw some Zitting Cisticolas too which are uncommon in Australia. Holmes Jungle Nature Park is also supposed to be a good site for Eastern Grass Owls which apparently can often be seen hunting above the grasslands during the day in the mornings. Owls don’t actually exist though so I didn’t see any.
Holmes Jungle Nature Park is right next to Crocodylus Park which is where we went to next. This is a medium sized zoo in the Darwin suburbs with both natives and exotics and they specialise in crocs, hence the name. With this zoo visit, that makes the third zoo on this Top End trip which isn’t bad for an eleven day trip and although I had hoped to get to all three zoos, I thought I would probably only make it to Territory Wildlife Park. Most of the enclosures at the zoo are small and unremarkable, at least for everything except the crocs. They’ve got a variety of extremely common native birds, reptiles, and mammals, and a few exotics that are probably unusual for Australia with four species of primates, Maned Wolves, and three species of cat. Nicely laid out though in a small plot and worth popping into. The crocs are what makes the place more interesting though as they breed them here and breed hundreds. They have a row of about twenty breeding pens, each with a pair of huge Saltwater Crocs, some absolutely massive males too and a leucistic saltie, and of course lots of pools with young ones of different sizes ranging from just bigger than hatchlings to almost ready for handbags in size. They’re not shy about the fate of the crocs though, and they sell lots of crocodile leather and crocodile meat in the shop, the latter in the restaurant/café too. I think that is much better than pretending all the baby crocs live happily ever after.
They actually hold several species of crocodilian, beyond just loads of salties and a few freshies like Australian crocodile places tend to do. They also have American Alligators and, surprisingly for me because I wasn’t expecting either of these species, Philippine Crocodiles and New Guinea Crocodiles. Quite a few of the latter species, presumably they are trying to breed them. I wonder where they got those two species from? New Guinea Crocodiles in particular are not at all common in captivity and I don’t believe I’ve seen them before. Direct imports?
Crocodylus Park also does boat cruises on the nearby river where they see sort-of-wild (relocated) crocs and probably some common waterbirds, but you had to pay extra so I didn’t do that. I enjoyed visiting the place, well worth a few hours, and I like going to zoos anyway, especially new ones that have some kind of unusual feature. Oh, and they’ve got a rather impressive crocodile museum too with lots of quite interesting biological, cultural and conservation displays.
After Crocodylus Park since we got there early enough (none of these distances driven today are far at all) we headed to the Botanic Gardens for a proper visit. The one thing I wanted to see here was, you guessed it, a mythical imaginary owl. This is supposed to be the easiest and most reliable place anywhere to see a Rufous Owl (though I have actually seen one before two years ago near Cairns) because there is at least one or usually a pair that roosts here and they are supposed to be easy enough to locate. There is a small rainforest walk and they’re supposed to roost in the trees there or alternatively they apparently roost in the trees near the toilet block. But as I’ve said owls don’t exist. All the websites and guides tell you to just stare at the darkest bits of the trees and then you see the owls. Yeah, that’s definitely a ploy to have birders standing there staring at nothing for hours. I had a couple of hours at the botanic gardens, no owls.
So we then had to return the hire car that late afternoon so we did that and then walked from there back to the esplanade because despite being sure that owls don’t exist by this point, I still wanted to stare at some trees where Barking Owls definitely don’t roost for a few hours before dinner. Because the trees are right by some narrow stairs going from the upper esplanade level to the beach I had to basically stand right in the middle of a busy path to look for the owls, just staring at nothing with my binoculars. I did this for about two and a half hours, just up and down the same 30m of staircase at the same tiny patch of trees, but very dense trees. I would have given up earlier since owls don’t exist, but I did hear one short sequence of Barking Owl hoots and they’re distinctive so there’s no mistaking those. Someone has gone to the effort of hiding a tape recorder with Barking Owl calls in the trees too. All the locals seem to be in on the myth though, because a few people knew I was looking for the owls.
Then, to my shock and surprise, almost three hours on those damn stairs staring at trees for non-existent owls, there was one! It just sat there, perfectly still, with its eyes closed. Now that I’ve seen it, it would be very easy to direct anyone to it. Just look in the darkest bits of the trees… hmm. Anyway, the Barking Owl sat there, slightly opened its eyes, then closed them again. Then in a sudden burst of energy lifted a leg and sort of scratched its head then went back to sleep. The good thing about owl day roosts is that its walk-away views guaranteed. Must be a very realistic animatronic owl that someone put in that tree. If I didn’t know any better, I would almost say it was a real live owl.
That makes only the third owl species in two months on this trip so far. Three owls is better than no owls though, and I see owls at day roosts even less frequently than I see owls at night (both the other two were at night). I have another full day in Darwin tomorrow before leaving for Cairns the next morning, but I’m on my own without a car so limited to where I can get to by bus (i.e. this is Australia so nowhere at all) and where I can walk to and since a 4km walk is no problem for me, I can get to the botanic gardens to try again for Rufous Owl and possibly get to some mangroves to have another go at Chestnut Rail. Apart from those and Beach Stone-Curlew I’ve pretty much seen all of my main targets, which isn’t bad at all so I’m overall very pleased with having managed to get so much wildlife and to get to three zoos on top of that.
New bird:
Barking Owl
Kind of interesting that you seem to be very fortunate when looking for mammals at night, but can't find owls and frogmouths.
A Walking Tour of Darwin
I had a day on my own for today, back to wandering around aimlessly, or rather with the one sole aim of finding animals. I covered over 20ks today so it's a good thing I like walking. I like doing this, wandering around on my own is good fun. Not when it's costing me an average of 150 to 200 dollars (Australian) per day though which is I think is the absolute best cast scenario if I did a long trip in Australia on my own. That's the main reason I'm sponging off, I mean catching up with, family while in Australia and doing my wandering about on my own in Asia on the cheap (though I don't think my time in Singapore will be all that much cheaper.
Anyway, I headed off on my own in the morning to have a first look for Chestnut Rail. Buffalo Creek, the site I tried the other day which is supposed to be the best for them, is not accessible without a car, but the finding birds book also mentions another site to try if you miss them there (Stuart Park Mangroves) which is accessible along a rather unpleasant walk down a massive highway. So I walked down there first, timing my visit perfectly with being along one of the two main roads into Darwin at the morning rush hour. The other thing about being on my own of course is that if I want to spend 10 hours staring at some mangroves I can do that. I didn't do that though because there's no access into to mangroves and the ones by the road are too scrubby and secondary. So once it becane obvious that the only thing I was going to accomplish was getting killed by a car, I abandoned the rail and walked up to the Botanic Gardens.
Since owls are imaginary, I didn't actually expect to find any, but there were Rufous Owls in both of the last two ebird checklists from the gardens and even a picture with one so I decided to give their existence the benefit of the doubt and really go for it today.
I walked around the gardens for quite a few hours looking up at trees. There were many, many large bunches of brown shaped l leaves which were all trying their best to look exactly like owls.
Because there were no owls I went to look at the orchid and bromeliad house and I do particularly like those types of plants especially a big display of a diverse range of species. They had one of those weird ground orchid things like we're extremely common all around the Crocker Range but there was no label on that one so I still don't know what it is.
A big display of hundreds of species of orchids and bromeliads is all well and good and there were lots of unusual looking flowers but they're not rufous owls so I went back to look in the owl trees again. To my extreme surprise, one of the bunches of leaves suddenly materialised into a sleeping rufous owl! It was quite literally the darkest, most well hidden and furthest off the path and least photographable spot possible. Once I had found in with the binoculars and tried to manoeuvre to a better spot, I completely lost the owl and struggled to refind it back in the spot that I originally saw it. Even yesterday's Barking Owl was in a better spot than this (I managed pictures of that at least). It wasn't in the trees that it was supposed to be in either. Day roosting owls are the one bird that you expect to sit conveniently in the spot that the book says. Stupid owls. Why can't they just sit in the trees the books tell them to? That would make it much easier. There's supposed to be a pair of Rufous Owls so I thought I would try and find one in a spot that I could actually photograph but that's far too much to ask for.
I really need to stop converting prices of things into ringgit. I had lunch at the café in the Botanic Gardens and AU$12 for poached eggs on toast isn't actually that expensive for a touristy spot in a city, but more than RM35 for two eggs and a bit of toast seems obscene. I decided that I didn't fancy getting run over by a car while trying to look in the wrong sort of mangroves and not seeing a Chestnut Rail just because that's what my book tells me to, so I did what my other book told me to and went to a possible seawatch site instead. I can think for myself, honest.
I've already seen two of the resident dolphin species, but there was one more still to try for as well as dugongs and the possibility of some common pelagics so I thought it was worth a few hours at least. It was several Kms further on though which is not particularly pleasant in the heat and full sun. At least it's mostly flat though!
This was the correct decision. The walk up to the seawatch site was along a path along the back of a large sandy beach. The sort that's dotted with tourists rather than with birds. It's still the same bay all along though so I was keeping a look out for dolphins and dugongs and enjoying the slight shade of a row of casuarina trees between the path and the beach. Then suddenly a man ten metres back (as in, where I had walked right past minutes ago) called out, pointed up at on of the trees and said: owls. What? Owls? There's no way owls would roost in those sparsely leafed trees right out in the open sun.
These were not owls. These were much better than owls. Right there in the open in the fork of a casuarina trees right by the path there sat three Tawny Frogmouths! Finally! After 18 years of visiting Australia every couple of years for my whole life I had finally found some wild Frogmouths. I know they're supposed to be common in Australia and are hardly a speciality that makes birders flock to Darwin. But those three frogmouths just sitting there perfectly still and blending in incredibly well with casuarina bark, colour and pattern and all, easily jumped into the top ten birds of the Northern Territory trip. Probably in the top twenty for these last two months of the whole trip. An amazing bird. I kind of wish I had spotted them on my own rather than, you know, walking right past them, but they're fantastic.
Sometimes there are common birds that you just keep on missing and then when you finally see them it's almost embarrassing to admit they're a lifer, but frogmouths are just so amazing. I don't think they're quite as common in the South West as they are in the rest of Australia either, but they are present so that's just an excuse for my inability to find birds.
The tide was going out which is supposed to be best for spotting dugongs, but sitting in a hut looking out at the sea is boring so I decided to just walk along. It's all the same sea that I'm looking out at anyway. There is a path that goes all the way up the coast eventually getting to the Casuarina Coastal Reserve and Buffalo Creek which is where the mangroves that I had visited are. There are rocks along the back of the beach too and Beach Stone Curlews occur. So I just decided to walk along until I couldn't be bothered going any further (bearing in mind I was walking directly away from my accommodation the whole time) then turn back.
Everything was going well until all of a sudden, my phone died. I was able to ascertain that the reason was due to the battery suddenly dropping from 21% to 2% and the cable that I had with me to charge from the powerbank was not working properly. I did get a fuzzy screen with lines on it at one point so I was rather worried that I had managed to break a second phone on this trip (avid readers will recall that I broke the first phone in a rainstorm at Bukit Fraser about seven weeks ago now) but I managed to get the phone to turn on, show me 1% charge remaining and then instantly turn off again. I’ve become rather reliant on my phone. Every possible bit of information is stored on my phone, all documents and tickets or bookings of any kind of on the phone. All my navigation is through the phone too, as are my books and entertainment things like that, and since my watch broke at Mount Kinabalu it’s been my only source of the time too! I was tempted to go back to the accommodation to plug it in to the wall socket, but I was a good 4km away so if I went back I wouldn’t get out again and I didn’t want to spend my last day in Darwin sitting on the internet. I knew roughly where I was going in the city at this point and how to get back without maps, I had the key code to the house memorized and I could just tell the time by looking at the tides and the exact angle of the sun. Who needs a phone? (Except of course I have no idea how to tell the time from the tides and the sun beyond ‘day’ ‘nearly the end of day’ and ‘not day anymore).
Basically, you’ve just read a paragraph where all I do is moan and overdramatise my phone running out of charge. Why anyone still reads this rubbish is beyond me.
So I kept walking for what I can very accurately quantity as ‘some’ amount of time which was less than a day. Then I turned around and walked back. And I did all that walking and navigating without google maps. I expect I shall get a Duke of Edinburgh Award now. And a Victoria Cross. You know, for bravery of soldiering on why I wasn’t able to google anything as soon as it popped into my head.
I walked along scanning the bay for dugongs the whole time but no luck. Unlike dolphins, dugongs don’t splash about at the surface so you’d have to be lucky to spot one. There was a sign by the path about how dugongs graze on the seagrass beds just of shore as well as describing the creation story of the local aboriginal group, over which someone had scratched ‘ha ha, ******** story’. Obviously a keen intellectual.
As I was walking back, I noticed that the Northern Territory Museum was just nearby and the sign said free entry so I went in. It’s not a particularly big museum, but is rather nice and I was impressed by it. It’s all about the Northern Territory, about 60% natural history stuff and 40% cultural stuff including a big display about cyclone Tracy. The natural history displays were really good though, very well done and very interesting. Well worth a visit for an hour and a half maybe. I don’t know how long I was in there. Without my phone I couldn’t photograph any displays really because I use that to photograph things like that and just have a 70-300mm lens on my camera but oh well, it doesn’t matter. I also finally got all the targets that I had missed like the Chestnut Rail, Beach Stone Curlew and Cockatiel. They were taxidermied but beggars can’t be choosers. Really nice views of the Chestnut Rail though, for such a shy bird it wasn’t at all bothered about the bright lights in the display case and just standing there mid-stride the whole time. That’s the advantage of taxidermy specimens, you always get walkaway views. Even the Black Wallaroo didn’t run away. It didn’t look particularly healthy though. Although I will say that the standard of taxidermy was much higher than in most museums, I think a lot of the specimens are relatively new.
I looked at the frogmouths on the way back of course because they’re awesome and I tried to find the rufous owl roosting again but couldn’t find it because owls suck. I genuinely could not re-find the roost of that owl even though I knew exactly which massive tree it was in and I had seen it early in the day. Everyone knows that frogmouths are way better than owls anyway.
I got back to the accommodation a bit after five-ish as it turned out. I was really very tired indeed from all that walking today, probably over 20kms when considering the back and fourth around the botanic gardens, so apart from going out a bit later for some dinner that was it for the day.
So a poor view of an owl, a fantastic view of some frogmouths, a nice coastal walk and a lovely little museum. A nice little day to stick on at the end of this leg of the trip. Tomorrow morning: off to Cairns! I’ve got almost exactly the same length of time in Cairns as I had in Darwin with a very similar logistical set up because most of the time in Cairns, apart from 24 hours at the end, I will be with my parents and my brother who are doing Cairns as a side-trip in and out of Perth which they are visiting for the usual visit to Perth-based relatives which takes place every two years. I’m basically still on the way to Perth right now. Everything I’ve done so far was just a short stop off on the way really and I’m in Perth for two weeks after Cairns. Naturally, I’ve got a month long stop over in Asia on the return to Warsaw too, but I’m getting ahead of myself now. I actually originally intended to have 6 days on my own in Cairns at the end rather than one, but the cost of accommodation and food and (especially if you want to go anywhere interesting) transport in Australia while I could be staying in Perth for free means I’ve cut Cairns slightly but I should still see most things and I have actually been to Cairns before for a short five day visit two years ago.
Oh, and one thing that hasn’t made it into the blog prior to this but seems fitting now is the unofficial official tourism slogan for the Northern Territory which isn’t actually from the tourism department but is effectively the official slogan and I’ve seen it quite a few times on signs on highways and also as car stickers and that sort of thing, and I saw it a few more times today: C U in the NT.
New birds:
Rufous Owl
Tawny Frogmouth
I had a day on my own for today, back to wandering around aimlessly, or rather with the one sole aim of finding animals. I covered over 20ks today so it's a good thing I like walking. I like doing this, wandering around on my own is good fun. Not when it's costing me an average of 150 to 200 dollars (Australian) per day though which is I think is the absolute best cast scenario if I did a long trip in Australia on my own. That's the main reason I'm sponging off, I mean catching up with, family while in Australia and doing my wandering about on my own in Asia on the cheap (though I don't think my time in Singapore will be all that much cheaper.
Anyway, I headed off on my own in the morning to have a first look for Chestnut Rail. Buffalo Creek, the site I tried the other day which is supposed to be the best for them, is not accessible without a car, but the finding birds book also mentions another site to try if you miss them there (Stuart Park Mangroves) which is accessible along a rather unpleasant walk down a massive highway. So I walked down there first, timing my visit perfectly with being along one of the two main roads into Darwin at the morning rush hour. The other thing about being on my own of course is that if I want to spend 10 hours staring at some mangroves I can do that. I didn't do that though because there's no access into to mangroves and the ones by the road are too scrubby and secondary. So once it becane obvious that the only thing I was going to accomplish was getting killed by a car, I abandoned the rail and walked up to the Botanic Gardens.
Since owls are imaginary, I didn't actually expect to find any, but there were Rufous Owls in both of the last two ebird checklists from the gardens and even a picture with one so I decided to give their existence the benefit of the doubt and really go for it today.
I walked around the gardens for quite a few hours looking up at trees. There were many, many large bunches of brown shaped l leaves which were all trying their best to look exactly like owls.
Because there were no owls I went to look at the orchid and bromeliad house and I do particularly like those types of plants especially a big display of a diverse range of species. They had one of those weird ground orchid things like we're extremely common all around the Crocker Range but there was no label on that one so I still don't know what it is.
A big display of hundreds of species of orchids and bromeliads is all well and good and there were lots of unusual looking flowers but they're not rufous owls so I went back to look in the owl trees again. To my extreme surprise, one of the bunches of leaves suddenly materialised into a sleeping rufous owl! It was quite literally the darkest, most well hidden and furthest off the path and least photographable spot possible. Once I had found in with the binoculars and tried to manoeuvre to a better spot, I completely lost the owl and struggled to refind it back in the spot that I originally saw it. Even yesterday's Barking Owl was in a better spot than this (I managed pictures of that at least). It wasn't in the trees that it was supposed to be in either. Day roosting owls are the one bird that you expect to sit conveniently in the spot that the book says. Stupid owls. Why can't they just sit in the trees the books tell them to? That would make it much easier. There's supposed to be a pair of Rufous Owls so I thought I would try and find one in a spot that I could actually photograph but that's far too much to ask for.
I really need to stop converting prices of things into ringgit. I had lunch at the café in the Botanic Gardens and AU$12 for poached eggs on toast isn't actually that expensive for a touristy spot in a city, but more than RM35 for two eggs and a bit of toast seems obscene. I decided that I didn't fancy getting run over by a car while trying to look in the wrong sort of mangroves and not seeing a Chestnut Rail just because that's what my book tells me to, so I did what my other book told me to and went to a possible seawatch site instead. I can think for myself, honest.
I've already seen two of the resident dolphin species, but there was one more still to try for as well as dugongs and the possibility of some common pelagics so I thought it was worth a few hours at least. It was several Kms further on though which is not particularly pleasant in the heat and full sun. At least it's mostly flat though!
This was the correct decision. The walk up to the seawatch site was along a path along the back of a large sandy beach. The sort that's dotted with tourists rather than with birds. It's still the same bay all along though so I was keeping a look out for dolphins and dugongs and enjoying the slight shade of a row of casuarina trees between the path and the beach. Then suddenly a man ten metres back (as in, where I had walked right past minutes ago) called out, pointed up at on of the trees and said: owls. What? Owls? There's no way owls would roost in those sparsely leafed trees right out in the open sun.
These were not owls. These were much better than owls. Right there in the open in the fork of a casuarina trees right by the path there sat three Tawny Frogmouths! Finally! After 18 years of visiting Australia every couple of years for my whole life I had finally found some wild Frogmouths. I know they're supposed to be common in Australia and are hardly a speciality that makes birders flock to Darwin. But those three frogmouths just sitting there perfectly still and blending in incredibly well with casuarina bark, colour and pattern and all, easily jumped into the top ten birds of the Northern Territory trip. Probably in the top twenty for these last two months of the whole trip. An amazing bird. I kind of wish I had spotted them on my own rather than, you know, walking right past them, but they're fantastic.
Sometimes there are common birds that you just keep on missing and then when you finally see them it's almost embarrassing to admit they're a lifer, but frogmouths are just so amazing. I don't think they're quite as common in the South West as they are in the rest of Australia either, but they are present so that's just an excuse for my inability to find birds.
The tide was going out which is supposed to be best for spotting dugongs, but sitting in a hut looking out at the sea is boring so I decided to just walk along. It's all the same sea that I'm looking out at anyway. There is a path that goes all the way up the coast eventually getting to the Casuarina Coastal Reserve and Buffalo Creek which is where the mangroves that I had visited are. There are rocks along the back of the beach too and Beach Stone Curlews occur. So I just decided to walk along until I couldn't be bothered going any further (bearing in mind I was walking directly away from my accommodation the whole time) then turn back.
Everything was going well until all of a sudden, my phone died. I was able to ascertain that the reason was due to the battery suddenly dropping from 21% to 2% and the cable that I had with me to charge from the powerbank was not working properly. I did get a fuzzy screen with lines on it at one point so I was rather worried that I had managed to break a second phone on this trip (avid readers will recall that I broke the first phone in a rainstorm at Bukit Fraser about seven weeks ago now) but I managed to get the phone to turn on, show me 1% charge remaining and then instantly turn off again. I’ve become rather reliant on my phone. Every possible bit of information is stored on my phone, all documents and tickets or bookings of any kind of on the phone. All my navigation is through the phone too, as are my books and entertainment things like that, and since my watch broke at Mount Kinabalu it’s been my only source of the time too! I was tempted to go back to the accommodation to plug it in to the wall socket, but I was a good 4km away so if I went back I wouldn’t get out again and I didn’t want to spend my last day in Darwin sitting on the internet. I knew roughly where I was going in the city at this point and how to get back without maps, I had the key code to the house memorized and I could just tell the time by looking at the tides and the exact angle of the sun. Who needs a phone? (Except of course I have no idea how to tell the time from the tides and the sun beyond ‘day’ ‘nearly the end of day’ and ‘not day anymore).
Basically, you’ve just read a paragraph where all I do is moan and overdramatise my phone running out of charge. Why anyone still reads this rubbish is beyond me.
So I kept walking for what I can very accurately quantity as ‘some’ amount of time which was less than a day. Then I turned around and walked back. And I did all that walking and navigating without google maps. I expect I shall get a Duke of Edinburgh Award now. And a Victoria Cross. You know, for bravery of soldiering on why I wasn’t able to google anything as soon as it popped into my head.
I walked along scanning the bay for dugongs the whole time but no luck. Unlike dolphins, dugongs don’t splash about at the surface so you’d have to be lucky to spot one. There was a sign by the path about how dugongs graze on the seagrass beds just of shore as well as describing the creation story of the local aboriginal group, over which someone had scratched ‘ha ha, ******** story’. Obviously a keen intellectual.
As I was walking back, I noticed that the Northern Territory Museum was just nearby and the sign said free entry so I went in. It’s not a particularly big museum, but is rather nice and I was impressed by it. It’s all about the Northern Territory, about 60% natural history stuff and 40% cultural stuff including a big display about cyclone Tracy. The natural history displays were really good though, very well done and very interesting. Well worth a visit for an hour and a half maybe. I don’t know how long I was in there. Without my phone I couldn’t photograph any displays really because I use that to photograph things like that and just have a 70-300mm lens on my camera but oh well, it doesn’t matter. I also finally got all the targets that I had missed like the Chestnut Rail, Beach Stone Curlew and Cockatiel. They were taxidermied but beggars can’t be choosers. Really nice views of the Chestnut Rail though, for such a shy bird it wasn’t at all bothered about the bright lights in the display case and just standing there mid-stride the whole time. That’s the advantage of taxidermy specimens, you always get walkaway views. Even the Black Wallaroo didn’t run away. It didn’t look particularly healthy though. Although I will say that the standard of taxidermy was much higher than in most museums, I think a lot of the specimens are relatively new.
I looked at the frogmouths on the way back of course because they’re awesome and I tried to find the rufous owl roosting again but couldn’t find it because owls suck. I genuinely could not re-find the roost of that owl even though I knew exactly which massive tree it was in and I had seen it early in the day. Everyone knows that frogmouths are way better than owls anyway.
I got back to the accommodation a bit after five-ish as it turned out. I was really very tired indeed from all that walking today, probably over 20kms when considering the back and fourth around the botanic gardens, so apart from going out a bit later for some dinner that was it for the day.
So a poor view of an owl, a fantastic view of some frogmouths, a nice coastal walk and a lovely little museum. A nice little day to stick on at the end of this leg of the trip. Tomorrow morning: off to Cairns! I’ve got almost exactly the same length of time in Cairns as I had in Darwin with a very similar logistical set up because most of the time in Cairns, apart from 24 hours at the end, I will be with my parents and my brother who are doing Cairns as a side-trip in and out of Perth which they are visiting for the usual visit to Perth-based relatives which takes place every two years. I’m basically still on the way to Perth right now. Everything I’ve done so far was just a short stop off on the way really and I’m in Perth for two weeks after Cairns. Naturally, I’ve got a month long stop over in Asia on the return to Warsaw too, but I’m getting ahead of myself now. I actually originally intended to have 6 days on my own in Cairns at the end rather than one, but the cost of accommodation and food and (especially if you want to go anywhere interesting) transport in Australia while I could be staying in Perth for free means I’ve cut Cairns slightly but I should still see most things and I have actually been to Cairns before for a short five day visit two years ago.
Oh, and one thing that hasn’t made it into the blog prior to this but seems fitting now is the unofficial official tourism slogan for the Northern Territory which isn’t actually from the tourism department but is effectively the official slogan and I’ve seen it quite a few times on signs on highways and also as car stickers and that sort of thing, and I saw it a few more times today: C U in the NT.
New birds:
Rufous Owl
Tawny Frogmouth
I know, it's really weird! Both of the two species of owls that I saw in Malaysia were from night boat cruises and neither of them were spotted by me. You don't normally see much eyeshine from owls though, I assume because they close their eyes or something, and you instead generally find them by shape which I'm not as good at as I am with eyeshine.
I self-found several nightjars in Malaysia though which you do find easily by eyeshine.
Philippine Crocodiles were imported from the Philippines by Melbourne Zoo in 1993 and 2002, and have since bred there (offspring were exported to Gladys Porter, who also have animals direct from the Philippines). I think the Crocodylus Park ones are Melbourne-bred but I'm not sure.
I don't know specifically where (or when) their New Guinea Crocodiles came from, but there have been several imports into Australia from a few different countries in (at least) the 1980s and 2000s. Marineland Crocodile Park has a lot of them apparently.
That's weird - owls have fantastic eye-shine!
You should just travel without a phone. Much more simple. Alfred Russel Wallace didn't take a phone with him.
Very weird, I hardly ever get eyeshine off owls when I do see them! I don't think I've ever found an owl by eyeshine as in, saw eyeshine in the darkness that materialised into an owl. When I do find them, it's always either at a day roost or as a shape at night. I do see eyeshine off owls once I've found them, I just never seem to find them that way!
Pfft, Wallace had it easy. Jetstar never expected Alfred Russel Wallace to check in online and even if they did, I'm sure Wallace would have been able to print off his boarding pass at his accommodation rather than use the electronic one.
Although having said that, if I was in Wallace's time I would have died of dysentery without antibiotics. No online check in, but dying of dysentery. Swings and roundabouts.
Across the Top!
My flight was at midday so there was no rush to head out, and the people at the Air BnB that I was at dropped me off at the airport too making it even easier.
At the airport, I decided to have an all day breakfast so I wouldn't be too hungry when I first arrived in Cairns at 3 PM. Breakfast is the only meal where Western food is better than Asian food. I would add 'in my opinion' to the end of that, but surely that's a fact. There is just one small terminal at Darwin for domestic and international flights and it's not a big airport. Sharing the runway though is the Air Force base which is just on the opposite side of the tarmac from the passenger terminal so that's pretty cool watching th fighter jets take off from the same place as all the commercial flights. There are lots of little planes operated by regional carrier Air North too which are always more interesting to watch than the narrowbody 737s or A320s which seems to be the only aircraft the normal Australian carriers operate on domestic routes. Air North operates some E-jets though which I rather like the look of generally.
My flight to Cairns is with Jetstar again. As I've said before and will say again, I just irrationally dislike Jetstar more than I should. Not enough to pay more for a different airline and Jetstar is the only carrier that operates Darwin to Cairns anyway. And because they're the only carrier and I had to get this exact flight to time it right with my aunt and my family, this is the one flight on this whole trip where I feel like I didn't get a good price. I think I'm paying about AU$330 for a one-way two and a half hour flight + baggage which is really shocking. For comparison my Kota Kinabalu to Singapore flight with AirAsia is only slightly shorter and cost me US$57.
I got a window seat for once which is nice for a change especially on a day flight over a cloud-free landscape.
There were some bush fires in the area around Darwin and dotted here and there all the way across the top which presumably are the controlled burns that are done regularly around here because there's so much tinder-dry grass and vegetation around that if they didn't do burn offs every now and again they would get massive fires.
The view was pretty amazing though: a very impressive mosaic of lightly wooded forests, grasslands, wetlands, rivers, and vast rocky escarpments criss-crossed by gorges as we crossed the Top End of the NT before reaching the Arafura Sea and then crossing the top of Queensland to reach the tropical rainforests of Cairns. Of course clouds started to build up over the sea and over the Wet Tropics of Cairns but it is a rainforest, clue's in the name.
The landing at Cairns was rather interesting because we had a missed approach. On the descent, suddenly, as we were getting very low in for landing, we had to rapidly pull up and climb steeply, pull the landing gear back up and then bank heavily to circle back around to the North. The captain announced that this missed approach was due to an aircraft on the runway that failed to take off and vacate the runway in time for us to land. I don't think I've ever had a missed approach before, so that was a fun experience. I'm not a nervous flyer, so it didn't worry me, but we pulled a bit of g on the steep ascent and the bank which is a feeling I find unpleasant. I’m the sort of person who absolutely hates the sensation of g forces from roller coasters and such.
My parents and brother, whom I will be travelling around Far North Queensland with for the next ten days, picked me up at the airport in their hire car. They had arrived in Cairns crack of dawn this morning after a night flight from Perth. The flight was scheduled to land a 3PM but because of the fly around and aborted landing we landed at about 3:30 and not wanting to waste what little bit of the day was left, we went straight to the botanic gardens from the airport. I have been to Cairns before on a short visit two years ago, but I like Cairns quite a bit so I’m here again and I’ll get to a few sites that I missed or didn’t have long enough at on my first visit. I also didn’t do all that much spotlighting when I was here the first time and there are a lot of mammals especially that I want to pick up. So although I’ll have big targets that will be lifers, most of the species will just be new for the trip/year especially those in sites like the Botanic Gardens that I visited last time. Great species to see though. There was one species that I really wanted from the botanic garden that I missed last time and it’s supposed to be easier to find at the gardens than pretty much anywhere else: Papuan Frogmouth. Two frogmouth species in two days, could I do it? Of course not. No frogmouths. But I’ll be back. There were heaps of Orange-footed Scrubfowls around which, funnily enough, is a common species that somehow I missed completely last time I was at the garden. I don’t need them now of course because I’ve seen heaps in Darwin where they are extremely common. Now watch me find all the Cairns rarities like pygmy-geese and whistling ducks which are really common in Darwin but which I completely missed last time I was in Cairns.
Anyway, as it got dark we went into Cairns for some dinner passing the characteristic Cairns flying foxes on the way. I was going to go spotlighting at the Botanic Gardens because there’s supposed to be a good chance at Striped Possum and I think I’ll have better luck finding frogmouths when they’re flying about rather than sitting still. I’m staying about 3kms from the gardens (but conveniently close to the esplanade for first thing in the morning birding) and my dad has agreed to drive me over to the gardens at night and pick me up when I’m done which will be nice, but having completely missed a night’s sleep with their flight from Perth this morning being at the worst possible time for sleep in much the same way as my flight into Darwin was it wasn’t possible tonight. I’ve got two more nights with them in Cairns though so I will get to spotlight the botanic gardens tomorrow night at least. And if all goes to plan I will get a fair few nights of spotlighting around Cairns and on the tablelands and such so hopefully I’ll chalk up a good possumy mammal list.
So just a couple of hours of birding in Cairns today, but today can basically be considered a travel day anyway. My favourite thing about the city itself of Cairns though, and what makes it a place I consider one of, and possibly my top, favourite city in the world is the esplanade. At least as I remember it from two years ago. I’m looking forward to seeing it again first thing in the morning.
New birds:
Noisy Friarbird
Russet-tailed Thrush
Metallic Starling
Satin Flycatcher
Welcome Swallow
Australian Swiftlet
Superb Fruit-dove
Australian Brush-turkey
Laughing Kookaburra
Yellow-spotted Honeyeater
Black Butcherbird
Rainbow Lorikeet
Mammals:
Little Bentwing Bat
Spectacled Flying Fox
My flight was at midday so there was no rush to head out, and the people at the Air BnB that I was at dropped me off at the airport too making it even easier.
At the airport, I decided to have an all day breakfast so I wouldn't be too hungry when I first arrived in Cairns at 3 PM. Breakfast is the only meal where Western food is better than Asian food. I would add 'in my opinion' to the end of that, but surely that's a fact. There is just one small terminal at Darwin for domestic and international flights and it's not a big airport. Sharing the runway though is the Air Force base which is just on the opposite side of the tarmac from the passenger terminal so that's pretty cool watching th fighter jets take off from the same place as all the commercial flights. There are lots of little planes operated by regional carrier Air North too which are always more interesting to watch than the narrowbody 737s or A320s which seems to be the only aircraft the normal Australian carriers operate on domestic routes. Air North operates some E-jets though which I rather like the look of generally.
My flight to Cairns is with Jetstar again. As I've said before and will say again, I just irrationally dislike Jetstar more than I should. Not enough to pay more for a different airline and Jetstar is the only carrier that operates Darwin to Cairns anyway. And because they're the only carrier and I had to get this exact flight to time it right with my aunt and my family, this is the one flight on this whole trip where I feel like I didn't get a good price. I think I'm paying about AU$330 for a one-way two and a half hour flight + baggage which is really shocking. For comparison my Kota Kinabalu to Singapore flight with AirAsia is only slightly shorter and cost me US$57.
I got a window seat for once which is nice for a change especially on a day flight over a cloud-free landscape.
There were some bush fires in the area around Darwin and dotted here and there all the way across the top which presumably are the controlled burns that are done regularly around here because there's so much tinder-dry grass and vegetation around that if they didn't do burn offs every now and again they would get massive fires.
The view was pretty amazing though: a very impressive mosaic of lightly wooded forests, grasslands, wetlands, rivers, and vast rocky escarpments criss-crossed by gorges as we crossed the Top End of the NT before reaching the Arafura Sea and then crossing the top of Queensland to reach the tropical rainforests of Cairns. Of course clouds started to build up over the sea and over the Wet Tropics of Cairns but it is a rainforest, clue's in the name.
The landing at Cairns was rather interesting because we had a missed approach. On the descent, suddenly, as we were getting very low in for landing, we had to rapidly pull up and climb steeply, pull the landing gear back up and then bank heavily to circle back around to the North. The captain announced that this missed approach was due to an aircraft on the runway that failed to take off and vacate the runway in time for us to land. I don't think I've ever had a missed approach before, so that was a fun experience. I'm not a nervous flyer, so it didn't worry me, but we pulled a bit of g on the steep ascent and the bank which is a feeling I find unpleasant. I’m the sort of person who absolutely hates the sensation of g forces from roller coasters and such.
My parents and brother, whom I will be travelling around Far North Queensland with for the next ten days, picked me up at the airport in their hire car. They had arrived in Cairns crack of dawn this morning after a night flight from Perth. The flight was scheduled to land a 3PM but because of the fly around and aborted landing we landed at about 3:30 and not wanting to waste what little bit of the day was left, we went straight to the botanic gardens from the airport. I have been to Cairns before on a short visit two years ago, but I like Cairns quite a bit so I’m here again and I’ll get to a few sites that I missed or didn’t have long enough at on my first visit. I also didn’t do all that much spotlighting when I was here the first time and there are a lot of mammals especially that I want to pick up. So although I’ll have big targets that will be lifers, most of the species will just be new for the trip/year especially those in sites like the Botanic Gardens that I visited last time. Great species to see though. There was one species that I really wanted from the botanic garden that I missed last time and it’s supposed to be easier to find at the gardens than pretty much anywhere else: Papuan Frogmouth. Two frogmouth species in two days, could I do it? Of course not. No frogmouths. But I’ll be back. There were heaps of Orange-footed Scrubfowls around which, funnily enough, is a common species that somehow I missed completely last time I was at the garden. I don’t need them now of course because I’ve seen heaps in Darwin where they are extremely common. Now watch me find all the Cairns rarities like pygmy-geese and whistling ducks which are really common in Darwin but which I completely missed last time I was in Cairns.
Anyway, as it got dark we went into Cairns for some dinner passing the characteristic Cairns flying foxes on the way. I was going to go spotlighting at the Botanic Gardens because there’s supposed to be a good chance at Striped Possum and I think I’ll have better luck finding frogmouths when they’re flying about rather than sitting still. I’m staying about 3kms from the gardens (but conveniently close to the esplanade for first thing in the morning birding) and my dad has agreed to drive me over to the gardens at night and pick me up when I’m done which will be nice, but having completely missed a night’s sleep with their flight from Perth this morning being at the worst possible time for sleep in much the same way as my flight into Darwin was it wasn’t possible tonight. I’ve got two more nights with them in Cairns though so I will get to spotlight the botanic gardens tomorrow night at least. And if all goes to plan I will get a fair few nights of spotlighting around Cairns and on the tablelands and such so hopefully I’ll chalk up a good possumy mammal list.
So just a couple of hours of birding in Cairns today, but today can basically be considered a travel day anyway. My favourite thing about the city itself of Cairns though, and what makes it a place I consider one of, and possibly my top, favourite city in the world is the esplanade. At least as I remember it from two years ago. I’m looking forward to seeing it again first thing in the morning.
New birds:
Noisy Friarbird
Russet-tailed Thrush
Metallic Starling
Satin Flycatcher
Welcome Swallow
Australian Swiftlet
Superb Fruit-dove
Australian Brush-turkey
Laughing Kookaburra
Yellow-spotted Honeyeater
Black Butcherbird
Rainbow Lorikeet
Mammals:
Little Bentwing Bat
Spectacled Flying Fox
A Productive Day of Wildlife in Cairns and Kuranda
I started the day with the best thing to do first thing in the morning in Cairns: birding the Cairns Esplanade at sunrise. Although it’s not wader time of year in Australia, plenty of waders do overwinter anyway, I believe first year birds especially, and given how urban and in the middle of the city it is, the trees that line the esplanade do hold lots of interesting birds too including Metallic Starlings, Figbirds, and Fig Parrots. The latter is surprisingly easy to find just in the trees right around there. Despite having birding the esplanade on several mornings when I was last in Cairns, I even managed a rather nice lifer in the form of a Yellow Honeyeater which is quite an attractive honeyeater species.
I birded the esplanade for a good couple of hours until all of my family was awake and ready for breakfast and we decided that today we would do a daytrip to Kuranda. Daytrips aren’t ideal for wildlife watching because you get there in the middle of the day and can’t be there for spotlighting, but it doesn’t actually get very hot at all at this time of year especially by the standards of a rainforest, only into the mid-twenties, and I actually found it a little chilly given that it was a bit of a cloudy day today. At one point I intended to spend a couple of nights in Kuranda at the end of my time in Cairns, but that has been axed because I decided it was not worth the money and so I’ll just do it on this day trip.
However being a day trip meant we could take the skyrail up. The Kuranda Skyrail is a cable car that goes right over the rainforest of Barron Gorge National Park and it’s a really long cable car, 6.5km according to the signs and a good 30+ minutes each way actually in the air above the canopy. There are a couple of stops on the way too with short boardwalks to look in the forest and at the Barron Falls as well which is quite an impressive waterfall. Although it is a rather pricey $80 per person for a return trip, it is an excellent view and a great experience of the forest from above. In Kuranda there are a number of zoos, but I have been to Kuranda before for a two night stay on my last trip here so I did most of the zoos then. The one I missed then was BatReach which is a small bat rescue centre just in the garden of a private house so I wanted to visit that place this time but it was again closed, this time for bat breeding season because they had a lot of orphan bats to look after. It’s also worth noting that the Australian Venom Zoo now seems to be completely shut. This is a rather interesting facility that I visited last time that has some nice displays of venomous animals and produces venom for antivenom production, so it’s a shame that the place seems to have shut. There are three other zoos here: the Kuranda Koala Gardens, Butterfly Sanctuary, and BirdWorld but I went to all of these places last time so didn’t feel the need to revisit, especially given more limited time in Kuranda and over $60 in entry fees to visit the three places.
Instead, I did some birding along the rainforest walks around the town, which were not bad birding and I saw a number of rather nice species. Mostly not lifers given a two night stay in the area two years ago (at the famous Cassowary House where I did see wild cassowaries), but I did actually manage a couple of lifers which I’m pleased with. There were a fair few Wompoo Fruit Doves and some Pale-yellow Robins around too which are two species that I really like, the former for amazing colour and looking awesome, the latter for very entertaining and interesting behaviour to watch. I wanted to see a Chowchilla but I missed those, as I did last time I was in Kuranda. Hopefully I will find one on this trip since it’s a regional endemic. There was even a tree in the Kuranda village centre that was so full of fig-parrots that it was raining bits of fig fruit from above. They really are wonderful birds, such cute stubby little things.
I just had a few hours to bird in Kuranda but racked up a fair species list. I really want to see a Noisy Pitta on this trip too and that’s definitely one of my top target birds for this leg of the trip (though my real main targets are mammals) so hopefully I will get one at some point.
Upon return to Cairns there were still a couple of hours of daylight left so we popped by the Jack Barnes Mangrove Boardwalk which is a very extensive several kilometre long boardwalk that goes through the boardwalks right near the airport. It was very quiet bird wise with slow bird activity, but there were things like Mistletoebirds and Rainbow Lorikeets around. I did see a female Lovely Fairy-wren though near the edge of the mangroves proper. Not the really pretty male, but the female is actually nice looking than the females of most Fairy-wren species. There was a sign at the boardwalk encouraging people to lick the leaves of a specific mangrove because it excretes salt onto the leaves. There was no identification advice for which mangrove you were supposed to lick though and I’m not sure about the hygiene levels of it, but I licked all of the different mangrove species and none of the leaves were in the slightest bit salty. I’ll probably get dysentery or something now. Oh wait, done that one already.
After dinner back at the hotel, my dad kindly agreed to drop me off and pick me up from the Botanic Gardens for my spotlighting. They’re just under 3kms away which is probably walkable but slightly too far to be a comfortable walk. My dad dropped me off after dinner and agreed to pick me up at 10 which was very convenient giving me a good bit of time for spotlighting at the gardens. The main thing I was looking for here was/is a Striped Possum which is supposed to be relatively easier to see here compared to most other places. However ‘easy to see’ and ‘Striped Possum’ are two concepts that don’t really mix and I didn’t find any striped possums. However that’s not to say the spotlighting was unsuccessful and I’m quite pleased with what I found. In addition to Spectacled Flying Foxes and Bentwing Bats which are both common and not surprising to see, there were four particularly interesting sightings. The first were some Eastern Blossom Bats, then a White-tailed Giant-rat which ran along the branches near the boardwalk with a pandanus nut, occasionally sitting for a few seconds on branch. I then got a surprise species that I wasn’t really expecting at all which was only my second ever wild Echidna after my first one four years ago in the South West. This echidna was foraging around near the boardwalk and walked around a bit and was not at all shy so it was great to watch. Finally, just as I was heading back to the car, high up in a tree I spotted a Papuan Frogmouth! It was so much bigger than a Tawny Frogmouth that it took me a while to realise what it was, and of course being at night it wasn’t in a roosting position but instead was sitting on a branch and looking around and had its feathers puffed up so that probably made it look very different to the roosting frogmouths from two days ago but I think Papuans are genuinely bigger anyway. Not a bad night of spotlighting at all!
Tomorrow is my last full day in Cairns and the plan is a half day on Green Island in the Great Barrier Reef with some local birding in the afternoon.
New Birds:
Lesser Crested Tern
Wandering Tattler
Greater Crested Tern
Black-tailed Godwit
Sanderling
Curlew-sandpiper
Osprey
Straited Heron (should be on the list much earlier but seems to have been missed off)
Double-eyed Fig-parrot
Varied Honeyeater
Great Knot
Roseate Tern
Black-naped Tern
Common Sandpiper
Yellow Honeyeater
Barred Cuckooshrike
Yellow-faced Honeyeater
Topknot Pigeon
Graceful Honeyeater
Yellow-breasted Boatbill
Large-billed Scrubwren
Pale-yellow Robin
Wompoo Fruit-dove
Spectacled Monarch
Spotted Catbird
Pied Monarch
Rufous Fantail
Brown Gerygone
White-headed Pigeon
Macleay’s Honeyeater
White-throated Treecreeper
White-eared Monarch
Lovely Fairy-wren
Papuan Frogmouth
Mammals:
Eastern Blossom Bat
White-tailed Giant Rat
Short-beaked Echidna
I started the day with the best thing to do first thing in the morning in Cairns: birding the Cairns Esplanade at sunrise. Although it’s not wader time of year in Australia, plenty of waders do overwinter anyway, I believe first year birds especially, and given how urban and in the middle of the city it is, the trees that line the esplanade do hold lots of interesting birds too including Metallic Starlings, Figbirds, and Fig Parrots. The latter is surprisingly easy to find just in the trees right around there. Despite having birding the esplanade on several mornings when I was last in Cairns, I even managed a rather nice lifer in the form of a Yellow Honeyeater which is quite an attractive honeyeater species.
I birded the esplanade for a good couple of hours until all of my family was awake and ready for breakfast and we decided that today we would do a daytrip to Kuranda. Daytrips aren’t ideal for wildlife watching because you get there in the middle of the day and can’t be there for spotlighting, but it doesn’t actually get very hot at all at this time of year especially by the standards of a rainforest, only into the mid-twenties, and I actually found it a little chilly given that it was a bit of a cloudy day today. At one point I intended to spend a couple of nights in Kuranda at the end of my time in Cairns, but that has been axed because I decided it was not worth the money and so I’ll just do it on this day trip.
However being a day trip meant we could take the skyrail up. The Kuranda Skyrail is a cable car that goes right over the rainforest of Barron Gorge National Park and it’s a really long cable car, 6.5km according to the signs and a good 30+ minutes each way actually in the air above the canopy. There are a couple of stops on the way too with short boardwalks to look in the forest and at the Barron Falls as well which is quite an impressive waterfall. Although it is a rather pricey $80 per person for a return trip, it is an excellent view and a great experience of the forest from above. In Kuranda there are a number of zoos, but I have been to Kuranda before for a two night stay on my last trip here so I did most of the zoos then. The one I missed then was BatReach which is a small bat rescue centre just in the garden of a private house so I wanted to visit that place this time but it was again closed, this time for bat breeding season because they had a lot of orphan bats to look after. It’s also worth noting that the Australian Venom Zoo now seems to be completely shut. This is a rather interesting facility that I visited last time that has some nice displays of venomous animals and produces venom for antivenom production, so it’s a shame that the place seems to have shut. There are three other zoos here: the Kuranda Koala Gardens, Butterfly Sanctuary, and BirdWorld but I went to all of these places last time so didn’t feel the need to revisit, especially given more limited time in Kuranda and over $60 in entry fees to visit the three places.
Instead, I did some birding along the rainforest walks around the town, which were not bad birding and I saw a number of rather nice species. Mostly not lifers given a two night stay in the area two years ago (at the famous Cassowary House where I did see wild cassowaries), but I did actually manage a couple of lifers which I’m pleased with. There were a fair few Wompoo Fruit Doves and some Pale-yellow Robins around too which are two species that I really like, the former for amazing colour and looking awesome, the latter for very entertaining and interesting behaviour to watch. I wanted to see a Chowchilla but I missed those, as I did last time I was in Kuranda. Hopefully I will find one on this trip since it’s a regional endemic. There was even a tree in the Kuranda village centre that was so full of fig-parrots that it was raining bits of fig fruit from above. They really are wonderful birds, such cute stubby little things.
I just had a few hours to bird in Kuranda but racked up a fair species list. I really want to see a Noisy Pitta on this trip too and that’s definitely one of my top target birds for this leg of the trip (though my real main targets are mammals) so hopefully I will get one at some point.
Upon return to Cairns there were still a couple of hours of daylight left so we popped by the Jack Barnes Mangrove Boardwalk which is a very extensive several kilometre long boardwalk that goes through the boardwalks right near the airport. It was very quiet bird wise with slow bird activity, but there were things like Mistletoebirds and Rainbow Lorikeets around. I did see a female Lovely Fairy-wren though near the edge of the mangroves proper. Not the really pretty male, but the female is actually nice looking than the females of most Fairy-wren species. There was a sign at the boardwalk encouraging people to lick the leaves of a specific mangrove because it excretes salt onto the leaves. There was no identification advice for which mangrove you were supposed to lick though and I’m not sure about the hygiene levels of it, but I licked all of the different mangrove species and none of the leaves were in the slightest bit salty. I’ll probably get dysentery or something now. Oh wait, done that one already.
After dinner back at the hotel, my dad kindly agreed to drop me off and pick me up from the Botanic Gardens for my spotlighting. They’re just under 3kms away which is probably walkable but slightly too far to be a comfortable walk. My dad dropped me off after dinner and agreed to pick me up at 10 which was very convenient giving me a good bit of time for spotlighting at the gardens. The main thing I was looking for here was/is a Striped Possum which is supposed to be relatively easier to see here compared to most other places. However ‘easy to see’ and ‘Striped Possum’ are two concepts that don’t really mix and I didn’t find any striped possums. However that’s not to say the spotlighting was unsuccessful and I’m quite pleased with what I found. In addition to Spectacled Flying Foxes and Bentwing Bats which are both common and not surprising to see, there were four particularly interesting sightings. The first were some Eastern Blossom Bats, then a White-tailed Giant-rat which ran along the branches near the boardwalk with a pandanus nut, occasionally sitting for a few seconds on branch. I then got a surprise species that I wasn’t really expecting at all which was only my second ever wild Echidna after my first one four years ago in the South West. This echidna was foraging around near the boardwalk and walked around a bit and was not at all shy so it was great to watch. Finally, just as I was heading back to the car, high up in a tree I spotted a Papuan Frogmouth! It was so much bigger than a Tawny Frogmouth that it took me a while to realise what it was, and of course being at night it wasn’t in a roosting position but instead was sitting on a branch and looking around and had its feathers puffed up so that probably made it look very different to the roosting frogmouths from two days ago but I think Papuans are genuinely bigger anyway. Not a bad night of spotlighting at all!
Tomorrow is my last full day in Cairns and the plan is a half day on Green Island in the Great Barrier Reef with some local birding in the afternoon.
New Birds:
Lesser Crested Tern
Wandering Tattler
Greater Crested Tern
Black-tailed Godwit
Sanderling
Curlew-sandpiper
Osprey
Straited Heron (should be on the list much earlier but seems to have been missed off)
Double-eyed Fig-parrot
Varied Honeyeater
Great Knot
Roseate Tern
Black-naped Tern
Common Sandpiper
Yellow Honeyeater
Barred Cuckooshrike
Yellow-faced Honeyeater
Topknot Pigeon
Graceful Honeyeater
Yellow-breasted Boatbill
Large-billed Scrubwren
Pale-yellow Robin
Wompoo Fruit-dove
Spectacled Monarch
Spotted Catbird
Pied Monarch
Rufous Fantail
Brown Gerygone
White-headed Pigeon
Macleay’s Honeyeater
White-throated Treecreeper
White-eared Monarch
Lovely Fairy-wren
Papuan Frogmouth
Mammals:
Eastern Blossom Bat
White-tailed Giant Rat
Short-beaked Echidna
Very nice report!
I remember the Flying Foxes, at dusk thousands of them would fly around, which was an incredible sight.
Like you I did Kuranda as a day trip, taking the railway up and then the fantastic skyrail down. As of right now, Cairns and the surrounding areas has been the only rainforest I've ever been to, and the skyrail gives great views of it.
I remember the Flying Foxes, at dusk thousands of them would fly around, which was an incredible sight.
Like you I did Kuranda as a day trip, taking the railway up and then the fantastic skyrail down. As of right now, Cairns and the surrounding areas has been the only rainforest I've ever been to, and the skyrail gives great views of it.