The 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 and removed several others just like him from my clothing.
Back at our B&B that evening, I discovered that one of my boot socks was blood-soaked at its top and that my foot was red down to the toes.
Evidently one lucky blood sucker had attached itself to my leg just above the sock’s top and stayed there until he was ready to drop away, full as a tick. The anti-coagulant leeches use kept the small bite flowing for a while afterward.
As you might guess, we checked ourselves and our clothes thoroughly that night, but we didn’t find any other leeches, and, fortunately, there don’t seem to be any leech-related ailments equivalent to those sometimes carried by ticks.
I won’t be tempted to stay in the parking lots, though, leeches or no leeches.
During the “leech hike” we also found a couple of carefully preserved old-growth red cedars. Heavily logged late in the 19th century and early in the 20th century, this area contained lots of ancient trees so valuable that timber getters called them “red gold.”
Their durable, insect-resistant wood was prized for shipbuilding, furniture making, and other products. A scant few are left standing in all of Australia and we got to be in the presence of two judged to be 1,000 years old.
Seeing those grand trees was worth a bit of walking. Being in their presence for a while was worth a donation of blood.
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