Certainly the wildlife we experienced differed from what we’d typically seen before. Australia and New Zealand, so far removed from the rest of the world for so long, featured all sorts of famously unique creatures. I don’t need to elaborate. We’re all familiar with them. I simply enjoyed the opportunity to experience them in their home territories. Animals being animals of course didn’t always cooperate with my plans. I think they enjoyed mocking me.
Frequent Sightings
The variety of unfamiliar birds grabbed my immediate attention. We also saw a lot of the usual European transplants like house sparrows and common starlings which we ignored. I’ve never been much of a birder although my older son seemed to be leaning in that direction. He kept pointing at specimens and asked me to take photos. I ended up with a bunch of bird images in my collection as a result. I think I identified most of them correctly although feel free to correct me if you know differently.
- Ducks
- Black Swan
- Gulls
- Australasian Swamphen
- New Zealand Fantail
- Pied Oystercatcher
- Australian Magpie
- Rainbow Lorikeet
- Little Corella Cockatoo
The featured photo showed two Kookaburras. I’m actually proud of that one because I took it from the balcony of an apartment we rented in Nelson Bay, Australia. The Kookaburras perched pretty far away from me and I actually managed to get the photo without it being a blurry mess for once. I’m sure it was a coincidence.
Many of the birds we saw in their native habitat would be pets kept in cages back home in the United States. Here they were everywhere. Some like the cockatoos traveled in fairly large packs. They would land in a park and pretty much take over just like pigeons. I’d rather see a cockatoo than a pigeon.
Rare Sightings
We stayed in fairly populous areas of New South Wales during the Australian portion of our trip and we didn’t see a lot of kangaroos. In fact, I had to use a photo I took at a zoo in Sydney to illustrate this entry. I saw lots more kangaroos on my previous trip a couple of decades ago when we visited the Blue Mountains. Here along the coast, not so much. I’m sure they were there, probably in abundance, so we must have been unlucky. I likened it to seeing deer in the United States — ever-present but popping out on their own schedule. The kangaroos appeared whenever we least expected them as we drove along. At least our kids got to say they saw at least some wild kangaroos so we could strike that particular item from the list.
A Day on the Water
I noted earlier that we used Nelson Bay Harbour as a starting point for a whale watching excursion. Humpback whales spend their summer off the coast of Antarctica and begin to migrate in late autumn, a journey stretching thousands of kilometres towards their South Pacific breeding grounds. By early winter they pass along the eastern edge of Australia in great numbers. A quirk of geography placed the mouth of Port Stephens next to open ocean within the path of these mighty creatures (map). Ships departing from Nelson Bay could slip into the migration route with minimal effort.
Weather conditions seemed favorable the day we headed out. The open ocean had minimal chop. Cloudy skies diminished glare. The ship’s crew said that whales could be spotted easier on a cloudy day. I wondered if that might be one of those baloney sayings like it being good luck if it rains on a wedding day so nobody feels bad. Maybe the clouds worked because we found whales almost immediately once we left Port Stephens and hit the ocean. We continued to see multiple pods back-to-back for the next two hours. I didn’t get any decent photos — whales always seemed to breach while I focused elsewhere — although that highlighted my inability to move quickly enough more than a lack of subject matter. We definitely got our money’s worth.
The cruise also came with some bonus creatures. We got close-up views of two more marine mammals; common dolphins and bottlenose dolphins. The common dolphins actually followed our ship for awhile, catching rides in its wake. Then we sailed around a small rocky island where seals basked high above the waves.
Didn’t See at All
Sure, we saw some great animals. However our encounters seemed to be defined as much by iconic creatures we didn’t get to see in the wild. For instance, we tried like crazy to find a koala. I got lucky during my previous trip, spotting one in Noosa National Park in Queensland. This time, not so much. We traveled to the Tilligerry Habitat in Tanilba Bay (map) where koalas roam freely in groves along the Karuah River estuary. Workers there posted information about the latest koala sightings although none had been spotted on the day we visited. We looked anyway, starting where they’d been seen the day before, although they’d long since moved along elsewhere. At least we got a nice walk.
The platypus range covers a crescent of eastern Australia and we drove through places supposedly well-populated with them. I knew they must have been there because we stopped at a rest area along the motorway where signs warned people to not use yabby traps (street view). They can harm platypuses. Apparently these devices sometimes drown air-breathing animals. What is a yabby trap? Glad you asked. A yabby is a type of freshwater crayfish (scientific name – Cherax destructor) and people use those traps to harvest them. I had to look it up.
We didn’t see any kiwis in New Zealand either. Kiwis are nocturnal. They don’t appear in daylight during ordinary situations. It seemed strange to me that New Zealand pick a bird that hardly anyone ever sees as a national symbol. Nonetheless, that was the case with the kiwi.
We did see all three of these animals in captivity though, if that counts.
Articles in the Australasian Adventures Series:
- Preparations and Arrival
- On the Waterfront
- Vistas
- Geothermal
- Heading Inland
- The Hunter Region
- Wild Animal Encounters
- Captive Animal Encounters
- Epic Runs
- Breweries
- Lists
- Changes
See Also: The Complete Photo Album on Flickr
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