The weather is unbelievable, its lovely and warm. We haven’t been cold. We woke this morning to the sound of birds. It is so quiet here, you can hear the wind coming. The only sound is either us, the birds or the wind. We have the park entirely to ourselves.
This is a plumed honeyeater which was foraging in a gum tree not far from our camp. We have heard the Morse Code bird – it literally sounds like someone sending a morse code message. We saw a Spotted Bowerbird, Rufus Whistler, Currajongs, and several we just couldn’t identify because they were too small and fast. Plus lots and lots of goats any colour you can imagine. The spotted bowerbird came into camp this afternoon, it sounded exactly like a cat meowing. They are great mimic’s so I wonder where it heard that (Obviously feral cats around here as well) It has a bright lilac purple patch at the back of it’s head which really stands out from it’s drab little brown body.
These are Mallee Ring Neck Parrots – there are 4 different varieties of this parrot depending where you are. These are the ones found here. To make it harder to identify they also cross breed. The Mallee does not have the black/blue head of the other varieties. They all have the distinctive marked ring on the back of the head.
Bird identification and photography is really challenging.
We walked to the homestead which is a couple of kilometres from our camp. We bypassed the homestead on our way in and camped where I had booked, the Wool Shed. It turns out to be a good choice as the Wool Shed camp has a new large water tank with clean fresh water and there isn’t any water at the homestead. We have our own water, but we conserve it whenever we can so that we always have plenty. We walked about 5 kilometres in all. There were some water courses shown on our maps, but they are bore drains which no longer hold water. The original homestead was not built here but moved by dray from about 100 klms north east of here. It was surprising that it was high on stumps which are mostly white ant eaten. The house is fenced off for safety.
The soil is a very fine red sand and it would be hard to drive on when wet, as it would just go very soft. There is not a blade of grass that has any life in it. We have seen Echnida digging spots and some Wallaby tail drag and paw prints, most of the prints are goat. I found a very small scorpion which was about 1cm the smallest that I have ever seen. There are other burrows which don’t seem to be rabbit, perhaps bilbies.
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