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The plan for today had been an early start to get to Howard Springs for its 7AM opening to try for the pitta, then go down to Territory Wildlife Park, and then do another birding site in the evening and go spotlighting in the Botanic Gardens. However my intestines were not being cooperative. The dysentery is pretty bad now to be honest... I had quite bad dysentery during the night last night 😞
Well I guess getting a nasty disease is one of the two main indicators of an adventurous trip. The other being a traffic accident. I really mustn't tempt fate.
We eventually got out about three hours later than intended. I'm pleased we got out at all, first thing in the morning I was really terrible, but it seems like the 'I feel like I'm about to die' stage is just the first part of the day. Howard Springs Nature Park is a small recreational park type place with some barbecue stands and swimming areas, but it has a decent patch of monsoon forest and is generally regarded is the best place to find a Rainbow Pitta. It took a little bit of walking around, but not
too much, until I suddenly spotted a rainbow pitta moving low in the vegetation along a stream. It was a really good view, for a pitta, as it moved along the stream. Although in some vegetation I could see it well and get some half decent pictures. Rainbow Pitta is a slightly odd name choice. It’s got a highly iridescent blue patch on the wing, but what makes it unusual for a pitta is that it’s mostly black in colour with a green back. A very interesting pitta species.
After Howard Springs, we continued on to the Territory Wildlife Park, a zoo about 60km from Darwin in some bushland. It is not a large zoo in terms of the size of the collection, but what is there is really spread out over a large area of natural bushland so you walk along bushland tracks between the exhibits, or there is a train as well, and there are plenty of wild birds around including lots of Yellow Orioles and a few Blue-winged Kookaburras. I even saw a wild snake of some species here. After Malaysia I was starting to think that I was completely unable to find snakes! We were
at the zoo a bit later than we had intended, but still managed to get around it and left just at the 5PM closing time. The zoo focuses exclusively on nature Northern Territory wildlife with a fairly broad collection of native wildlife including aviaries, a nocturnal house, and an aquarium, though not a huge number of species, everything was nicely done. The nocturnal house included a number of nice rarities, as you might expect, and there were some particularly nice birds too including Beach Stone-curlews, and an endemic Melville Island subspecies of Masked Owl.
After the zoo, we headed back to Darwin, then had dinner and a quick pop around the Botanic Gardens for spotlighting. We didn’t spend very long there, but Northern Brushtail Possums are everywhere and there were Bush Stone-curlews, Black Flying Foxes, and what I believe are Common Bentwing Bats.
Tomorrow, we depart Darwin for Kakadu National Park. Thankfully, the antibiotics seem to be kicking in a bit.
Birds:
Sacred Kingfisher
Striated Pardalote
Banded Honeyeater Red-winged Parrot Blue-faced Honeyeater
Little Eagle
Mistletoebird
Buff-sided Robin Rainbow Pitta Shining Flycatcher Australian Pelican
Brown-capped Emerald
Dove
Forest Kingfisher
Bush Stone-curlew
Mammals:
Northern Brushtail Possum Common Bent-wing Bat
Black Flying Fox
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