Day 9 – Trip to Lamington and Day One – 15th of June The morning started with a surprise new bird just ten minutes before we were about to leave the hotel room, a Blue-faced Honeyeater flew up and landed on our balcony before flying away again a couple of seconds later. An excellent start. The new transport that we had arranged to get us to Lamington National Park would pick us up from outside the hotel so we waited there, starting 15 minutes early just to be sure we would get it. About ten minutes after it was due to arrive but still hadn’t, we gave the coach company a call and they said that it would be coming but it was running late due to traffic. 45 minutes late, it arrived, and a very ... read more

Day 8 – Sea World – 14th of June For my final day in Gold Coast I was undecided at first what to do, I had found a birding location that I wanted to visit, however my aunt completely refused because she was scared that we would get lost. So instead I had to choose between two half-zoo half-theme park places, either Dream World or Sea World. In the end we went for Sea World. We had arranged for the same taxi driver to come and pick us up, but he didn’t show up so we got a different taxi driver instead who agreed to charge us the same cheap price. It seems like there are way more taxi drivers around than there is demand for, there were loads just lining up outside the hotel and ... read more

We landed at Brisbane airport a little over an hour before sunrise, around 5 AM, and got out of the airport very quickly since it was just a domestic flight. We had planned to have breakfast at the airport, but because we were so early we decided to get to our accommodation first. Although our first stop in Queensland was in Gold Coast, flights from Perth to Gold Coast were nearly double cost of the deal we got from Perth to Brisbane so when we got out of the airport we went to the next door skytrain station to get the train to Gold Coast. This took a little over an hour but was very easy and efficient and it was quite nice to look at the landscape as it slowly brightened up around sunrise. We ... read more

After breakfast, we headed out for a day of birding to possibly central Perth’s best and most famous birding site, Herdsman Lake. This promised to be a very good day of birding… but the weather disagreed. It was raining in the morning and continued raining as we drove to Herdsman lake. When we got there it was still raining so we parked near the visitor centre and ran in to look around. There were several live animal exhibits here and various displays about wildlife, introduced species, etc. The live animals held were King’s Skink, Motorbike Frog, Splendid Tree Frog, Oblong Turtle, Western Bluetongue, and a tank with introduced fish species. Now the thing I’m wondering about – is this a zoo? Also in the visitor centre on an upstairs floor was a bird hide looking out ... read more

he next day I got up over an hour earlier at around nine o’clock for a bit of a longer trip for birding. We headed to a slightly further away area to visit some parts around Beelu National Park. We parked in a place called Fred Jacoby Park which is an area planted with some introduced plants however despite this some slightly more unusual birds were around including Grey Currawong and Splendid Fairy-wren. We then continued further away, passing a few extremely noisy Red-tailed Black Cockatoos, and into some more natural woodland where some very cool birds started to turn up. These included several lifers such as Varied Sitella, Western Spinebill, Western Yellow Robin, and some unusual birds that I had seen in the past such as Rufous Treecreeper, Golden Whistler, and Red-capped Parrot and I ... read more