Kangeroo Island - wildlife experiences

Kangeroo Island is like the name already says an island. It is situated south of Adelaide and about 155 km in length. It's the third largest island of Australia, if I remember right what I read in the tourist brochure. A bit more than 4000 people live there permanently - mostly from tourism, agriculture and fishing. KI is a quite popular tourist destination especially during summer, because it has nice beaches, "vast wilderness" (means 1/3 of the island is nature reserve, otherwise agriculture ..) it's pretty easy to see wild animals there - and then there is a lot of other stuff people can to like wine tastig, eat in fancy restaurants, go surfing, go horse riding,...

I go there for watching wildlife, hiking - and enjoy the beach for a change after all those mountain areas and the desert.

The first night I spend on a bush camping side in the shelter of some bushes directly behind the beach. The water is rather cold (current from Antarctic waters) and so is the wind - but it is just phantastic to have a looong beach walk over the white sand. It really smells ocean and you can taste the salt in the air. After having travelled for some three weeks now and hardly spent more than one night at the same place, it feels somehow a bit like "coming home" now. Time to calm down, take it slower, not to try to see and discover everything - just be. I don't know if this inner calm is due to the place or due to the time span travelling - it usually takes some time until you get out of your everyday life toughts, work related thoughts etc. and just start to relax, to live day by day.

Having some of the excellent Kangeroo Island wine helps with that relaxing, by the way ;o)

A cool thing with relaxing and "just being" is that you start to have more "time" for wildlife observations, both with your eyes and your ears. I love the mornings when camping in the bush. Just before sun rise there is a real concert of different birds. Some I already identify now like the Australian magpies (which are not related to European magpies at all despite of their name). They have a strange voice - nothing like I ever have heard before.

Magpie

One night there is even a blackbird singing very beautifully next to my tent. I can hardly believe my ears .. it's meeting an old friend from your childhood somewhere at the other side of the world. Could it really be a blackbird, that common Central European species? Some days later I chat to an Australian traveller at a camping site who tells me to be a keen bird watcher. Blackbird? He had never heard of that and did not believe me I heard such a bird - but he had a good book on identifying Australian birds. I find it immediately: Turdus merula, blackbird. They have even song thrushes in Southwestern Australia. Cool when you can impress a keen birder with identifying blackbirds :D!

I am actually more impressed by the pelicans, those huge elegant birds which seem to look at you so wisely. I don't remember if I have ever seen a wild pelican before .. possibly not.

The strangest animal encounter on Kangeroo Island (and maybe of my whole life until now) is with an Echidna. Those spiky animals do not only looke strange - they are also weird being egg laying mammals. Their diet consists of termites and ants which they search by digging in the sand with their long nose.

They certainly have a good sense of smell, but can't see very well .. apparently ..

Funny Echidna encounter: Echidna video on youtube

I visit  the big national park Flinders range as well. They have an excellent visitor centre there with lots of information on the area. Excellent is also the cafe - not only because of the cappuchino but also because you can have your next funny wildlife encounter then:

Thief video on youtube

Some more impressions from Kangeroo Island:

Pretty nice also to watch the New Zealand fur seals swimmign in the ocean and resting on the rocks. It does not look too easy to get onto the rocks though ..

Video of NZ Fur Seals and the coast

Heath Goanna. They are really long - up to a metre and kind of saved the island by killing rabbits. Rabbits have been introduced to Australia somewhen and are a real plague destroying local vegetation and competing with local animal species not adapted to them. It's the same story with many other foreign plant and animal species and led to strict measurements at the customs when entering the country. Trying to get rid of those alian species to save local ecosystems is an importand part of the work of Australian nature conservists.

Sleeping koalas and scarlet robin.

Cool is also the show of Raptor Domain with their tame falcons, eagle, owls and frogmouth. Apart of having the show one time per day the company also takes care of the rehabilitation of sick or wounded birds of prey. Most of them are released into the wild again after threatment (when/if they fully recover).

The barn owl Casper was that tame that it went to sit on my knee as well. After the show it got a mouse as reward.

Signs - sometimes funny, sometimes strange, sometimes strange and funny

What ever, why ever .. (sign at the entrance of the Little Desert)

It's really interesting to drive here .. often you have no idea what kind of animal it could be which could cross the road.

Or then the street may be quite crowdy ..

Sometimes birds run rather than they fly ..

Or there are other strange animals .. cyclists!

Well, somebody has painted the animal heads to the persons - but .. fits actually quite well, doesn't it??

 This one you really don't want to see when driving:

 Narrow, winding gravel road leading up and down through the mountains for the next 35 km - aaarrgh!

Then life seems to be dangerous in Australia. There are quite a few ways to die:

Deserts and swamps

After the Grampians I drive northwest to a place called Little Desert in Victoria and after that to the Ngarkat Conservation Park in SA . I have never seen a desert before and I am not going to drive to the Outback Australia during this trip .. there can be easily 35 or 40 °C now in summer - and that's not really my comfort temperature.

The Little Desert  and Ngarkat are actually no deserts in that sense but a very dry sandy regions with sclerophyll scrubland (and some eucalyptus species, of course) on it adapted to drought and hot temperatures. Mallee has an unique wildlife as well with special adapted animals like for example the rare Mallee fowl. The gag is that I freeze in the desert: It's around 20 °C and the wind feels really icy. You may laugh now - but after weeks in 30 °C you really shiver when it is 10 °C colder and windy! I just walked around a nature trail then to get some kind of impression of the landscape and plants. Animals you usually don't see that often during the day. They are more active during dawn and dusk and night.
My original plan was to camp at some bush camping site in the desert - but then suddenly I feel like having a shower and a cool beer for a change. No problem - you find a motel in nearly every village.

Desert Banksia, a typical plant of the mallee scrub. It is well adapted to fire since its fruits (nuts??) open only after a heat threatment.

 One of the information tables of the nature trek. Information is well done in the national and conservation parks here.

In that area there was also a swamp with boardwalks. Really funny was to see eucalypt trees growing as swamp plants .. like Alnus or Fraxinus in Europe :). Funny also to see a swamp here in this rather dry area. It falls dry during the summer though.
Apart from the nature conservation areas there is a lot of agriculture in this area of Victoria. I drove through endless corn fields, all of them yellow and to be harvested during this time of the year. Most of the water for irrigation comes from the Murray-Darling river system here in southwest Australia. There are big debates going on about water usage. Farmers would need more water or at least guaranteed access to water. In drought periods this is not necessarily the case and then they have to spend much money buying water from somewhere else - or they loose their crop and even more money, I guess.
On the other hand there is already taken too much water out of the Murray-Darling river system causing ecologican problems. With not enough water in the rivers, they can fall completely dry during drought periods - and what that means for water organisms is quite clear .. There also needs to be enough water in the river to flush out salts accumulated due to agricultural practises, otherwise the whole system can collapse.

And again there are kookaburras, those strange birds which are related to kingfisher. They are quite big though. Often such a kookaburra sits on some branch really quietly and just watches you .. like a ghost. A few kookaburras can make quite a lot of noice though - they make sounds like laughter. Actually I have heard those birds already in the beginning of my trip in the rainforest of the Royal National Park close to Sydney. I just had no idea what it could be - sounded like apes to me .. but it was that bird.

There were also some small yellowish birds flying around .. This one seems to be quite annoyed of me who intruded into its swamp.

Strange things

The strangest thing I have seen here in Australia so far are the Bottlemarts: What is in Sweden systembolaget and in Finland Alko is in Australia the Bottleshop. You can buy liquor in grocery shops here either. The difference is that you have also drive thru Bottleshops - the Bottlemarts in which you can shop out of your car ...

Strange is also you don't get automatically rice with your food when ordering something in Asian restaurants here. If you forget it (like I often do), you end up with eating only the sauce and whatever is in it (fish, vegetables .. depends on what you have ordered).

 Strange but really practical and tastefull: You can get coffee in coffebags ("teabags") here! No difficult coffee making or tasteless instant coffee when camping - it's no problem to have a decent cup of coffee in the morning!

Grampians

Melbourne and the Great Ocean Road in pouring rain .. I did not really feel like stopping and getting soaking wet, so I continue driving until I came to the next mountainous destination: the Grampians in Victoria. The Grampians are situated about 250 km northwest of Melbourne. There are sandstone cliffs, swamps, waterfalls, eucalypt forst, lakes and dry sclerophyll forest. It seems to be a bit touristic in some places, in others you can walk in peace ..

At the bush camping site there are some kangeroos again - and wallabies (smaller version of kangeroos). Mother wallaby is quite used to campers and does not mind me coming close and take some photos. Her child (do you call them puppies - or miniwallabies??) is rather afraid of me and tries to convince its mother to run away by making strange noices. Mother does not care, so miniwallaby just sits there and stares at me from a "safe" distance.

Spooked mini wallaby

mother wallaby left having lunch, mini wallaby right

Beautifully flowering Melaleuca bushes grow everywhere there ..
And what I also found:

A wet site with Utricularia dichotoma, a terrestical small bladderwort (carnivorous plant ) :D

Plants have the nice characteristic that they just grow somewhere and usually don't run away. Bird photography is more difficult - at least when not having a decent tele lens amont the equipment. Actually I thought of bringing one. The problem is just that in some point of that trip I'll get rid of my nice rental car and will be backpacking, trekking. Actually I already have too much / heavy equipment for a typical trekking vacation .. let's see if I come up with some solutions then.

Back to bird photography ..

My first encounter with an emu in an olive tree plantation prooves to be rather unsatisfactory in a photographic sense of view: When it sees me it runs like hell.

Evening atmosphere at a bush camping site in the Grampians (video, youtube): eveningvideo

Snowy Mountains - the alpine area

The Snowy Mountains are the highest mountains of Australia. They have treeless alpine region and apparently really snow in the winter – at least when believing the numerous warning signs “slippery when frosty” along roads and pathways. There are several ski resorts with a lot of shops selling snowboards, skis, ski outfits and stuff even now in November, which is down here definitely not the begin of winter but summer.  Snow seems to be something really special here since everything seems to have “snow” in its name. Even the radio channel you listen to is Snow-FM. 

Here a few impressions of the alpine area of the Snowies:

Looks quite similar from what we know from Scandinavia, doesn't it?
Well, actually only in such a landscape picture. When looking closer into the vegetation - it's completely different. The only plants which I somehow recognized were the buttercups, Ranunculus although I know only the genus from Europe. The species R. graniticola, R. gunnianus and the endemic R. anemoneus I saw where completely new and exciting for me.

Anemone Buttercup (R. anemoneus)

Alpine Marsh Marigold (Caltha introloba)

Alpine Hovea (Hovea montana)

And of course, I climb the Mt Kosciuszko which is with 2228 m the highest mountain in Australia. It is situated in the  Kosciuszko National Park which has a size of about 2500 km2. The first person to climb the mountain was the Polish explorer Strzelecki who named it after a Polish national hero - therefore it has such a difficult name. The area is special because this kind of ecosystem is rare in the hot and dry Australia - and it has a lot of species and special features which you can find nowhere else than here. 

 Funnily, eucalyptus (what else in Australia??) forms the tree line here: Snow gum trees.

Now in the middle of November spring is just starting in the highest parts and not all flowers are out now. Well - and it gets cold during the nights, even in the valleys .. at least the tent and my feet as well were frozen after a night out there.

Cold mist just before sunrise in the Boggy Plain valley.

Yes .. and grasshoppers look weird here .. and they are quite big!