Archive for April 13th, 2008
Birds and bloodsuckers
April 13, 2008The best places for us to see birds and wild creatures during our hiking trips turns out to where we leave our car, in car parks where the hiking trails begin.On the lookout and with binoculars ready, we hike kilometer after kilometer along trails through eucalypts, in rainforests, and in open spaces, seeing little that hops, runs, slithers, or flies.Then, if we’re to see wildlife at all, we find it back where we left our car an hour or two or three earlier.
Maybe our next book will be entitled “Birds and Beasts of Aussie Car Parks.”
Girraween Park’s main parking area for Castle Rock, for example, was our richest venue for sightings during one day of our Easter Weekend hiking trip. In contented groups close to pavement, kangaroos and/or wallabies grazed contentedly so long as we didn’t get too close.
Bird life was easy to hear and sometimes in our line of sight, in part because of the large trees with open space beneath them where land had been cleared for cars.
One crow-like bird even let us get within six feet or so as he sat at eye-level among the limbs of a pine tree, staring back at us for several minutes. Looking closer, we saw that this bird was dark blue, not black. His yellow eyes let us, with the help of our bird book, identify him as a satin bowerbird.
While he is easy to mistake for a crow, the male satin bowerbird will never be confused with the female of his species. She’s decked out in fancy, decorative feathers that are mostly green, and we were lucky enough to see two of her kind, briefly, later.
On this trip, we did get to see more than 30 bird varieties, including a half dozen that were new to us. We also saw rabbits the size of cottontails (one at a time, on three occasions), skinks, and red ants more than an inch long.
The wildlife that got my attention most dramatically, however, was small, black, and as lively as an inch worm on a warm day.
We’d driven down to the Washpool National Park in New South Wales and hiked into the World Heritage area rain forest there. It is the wettest and most lush rainforest we’ve seen here and we enjoyed its narrow trails.
I was listening to the varied calls of a lyre bird (they’re much easier to hear than to spot with one’s eyes), when I noticed a small black worm on top of one of my fingers.
I flicked it off. Then I saw that it hadn’t left. A second flick didn’t dislodge it either. It was a leech. I had to pull it off.
Before the day was out Kristi and I had spotted Read the rest of this entry »