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Published: September 17th 2009
Day 142 - Darwin
The alarm went off at 6am, it wasn’t an accident or anything it had been deliberately set then we deliberately ignored it for a good fifteen minutes longer!
We still managed a fairly early start out on the road so our extra time in bed wasn’t a disaster by any means! As it was the journey to our first destination wasn’t very long, Fogg Dam Conservation area is about 30kms south of where we’re staying at Howard Springs and is back along the Arnhem Highway in the direction of Jabiru. The reserve is a haven for wildlife and is part of the Adelaide River catchment. The dam was constructed by the RAAF in the mid 1950’s as part of the Humpty Doo Rice Project and aimed to provide its irrigation. The scheme failed but the dam had already become an important refuge for water birds and Fogg Dam became part of the Bird Protection scheme in 1993.
When we get there the first thing that greets us is the sign to say that the walk along the dam walk is closed due to the sighting of a large saltwater crocodile! We are able to
drive along the wall instead though so we do that, very slowly and almost at walking pace! The drive across shows us there is still a good amount of water within the ‘dam’ area and also a rather large crocodile trap! We continue across to the Pandanus Lookout but we can’t check out the views from there either because there are maintenance workers painting it! Nevermind, we’ve got a clear view across the floodplains from the dam wall albeit out of the car window! As we’re driving back there are a couple of tour groups heading in our direction so we pull over to let them pass and watch the Rainbow Bee-eaters diving into the water from the trees. It’s a lovely outlook.
The tour groups leave and a couple of ranger vehicles arrive towing a air boat, we wonder if they are going to be checking the crocodile trap although we think it’s unlikely because the door of the trap is clearly still open. We’re intrigued so we hang around a short while to watch them launch and to see where they head. We noticed a university building as we were driving towards Fogg Dam this morning and
we wonder if the young lady aboard the boat with the ranger is a student from there doing some research. We’ll never know but they did give us a wave as they went by.
We took the interesting Woodlands to Waterlily Walk which leads us through the paperbark forest on the fringe of the floodplain and onto a boardwalk over the dam. We hadn’t walked very far when I stop dead in my tracks, I’d felt a cobweb on my face. The cobweb was so strong that when we pushed our hand against it we felt immediate resistance! We looked for its owner and I was pretty thankful I’d been walking to the left hand side of the track because this was a huge spider! We’re not sure what type he is
(we've since found out that it was a Golden Orb spider thanks to fellow bloggers Kangaroojack)but we leave his web intact and then discover his friend just around the corner and he’s even bigger! Darryl grabs a stick to act as a probe and we continue with the walk. We pass huge ants nests built in the trees and swinging from branches, it’s all very intriguing.
Down on the boardwalk we’re treated to a good handful of birdlife including a spoonbill, egrets, sacred (white) ibis’s, a glossy ibis, 3 pheasant cougals, a dusky honeyeater, a pied heron, fish stranded in a mud puddle but no partridge in a pear tree!
We check our spiders on the walk back and somebody has broken the web which is a shame but the spiders are still sitting pretty! We spend ages trying to get some good photographs of them and then find a posing dragon fly which seems impossibly tricky to capture clearly with the cameras. Its little face is so gorgeous and the wings so delicate, there has to be a way to focus the camera successfully but try as we might we couldn’t manage it today.
From here we journey for a further 3km along the highway and turn off at the Window on the Wetlands visitor centre. It’s an excellent place for a visit and we even have a go at the activity sheet which we found at the end, it was good to test ourselves to see if we’d learned anything following our visit, of course we had!
On the top of
Beatrice Hill, the Window on the Wetlands is one of the highest points on the Adelaide River floodplain. The Limilngan-Wulna people speak for the land and call Beatrice Hill “Ludawei”. The displays within the visitor centre explain the traditional importance of using fire in the dry season to clear the land and make hunting easier. The controlled fires can burn for weeks and is depicted within the first display complete with sound effects. The displays are really well laid out and they’re not just pretty to look at, there are plenty that require interaction to give that added bit of learning. A good example is the mock Pandanus Tree where you remove segments of it to uncover the animals making it their home like the endangered Dunnart, a small mouse like creature living in its roots and the Figbirds who make their nest in its branches.
All good Top End wildlife associated displays generally include a crocodile and so we find both freshwater and saltwater varieties covered here. There’s also some additional reading material, it’s a folder detailing the crocodile attacks within the Australia and it makes sad reading. The only recorded attacks this year have cost two young
people their lives and one of them was a 11 year old girl who was swimming with her younger sister and two friends in Black Jungle Swamp in the outskirts of rural Darwin. The folder also contains pictures of a tourist standing ‘proudly’ on the top of a croc trap in Darwin harbour this year. He’d been fishing with his mates and had somehow transferred himself onto the top of the trap, beer still in hand, for the photo shot! Astonishingly there are only 24 recorded deaths associated to crocodiles (reported and included in the document we read) in Australia since 1975. We were both under the impression that there were a lot more than that.
Upstairs on the balcony you get a good view across the floodplains and had there been much birdlife about we would have been able to get a closer look using the telescopes that are on hand.
Back downstairs we go to the last of the displays which sees me clambering up a ladder and sticking my head through a small hole not know what is going to greet my eye line! This is an attempt at seeing the world from a Mudskipper’s
point of view, pretty scary if presented with something that might instantly eat you! Luckily there was nothing there that was big enough to eat me! I had a quick scan through the Nature Diary on the front desk before we left but nothing had been written under today’s date, unlike the 11th September 2006 when somebody noted 6 Buffalo in the area!
We’re undecided what to do with the rest of the day and there were quite a few choices but in the end we thought we’d end with a swim in some refreshing waters! Berry Springs is another recreational park, similar to Howard Springs but you can definitely swim here and the water is crystal clear! There’s a polite notice on entry to the park which spells things out nice and simple “If the car park’s full Berry Springs is crowded! Please come back later!” Luckily for us there are plenty of empty spaces in the car park so there should be plenty of space in the water!
The series of three pools are great and you can swim / float between them all. We start in the Berry Springs pool where the waterfall is so
have a little game of hide and seek for a while ducking under the falls to the other side! Then we swam through to the main pool and eventually on to the lower pool. The water is so clear and there’s plenty of fish to spy as we’ve got our snorkelling gear on minus the flippers! It’s a great place for BBQs too and the wood is in plentiful supply to light the campfires that are dotted around. There’s a couple of walks to do here, neither of them are very long but probably worth doing if we get the chance to return on another day but as it was we dried ourselves off and headed for home.
We did manage one more stop on the way through, Strauss Airfield which we happened to spot on the side of the highway. Another silly photo opportunity for us as there are 1 dimensional mock planes lining the side of what was the runway!
Back at the caravan we spent some time looking for ways to rectify the problem we have with the car for less time than we’ve been quoted through Alan. We think we’ve found somewhere so will
go and talk to them tomorrow while we’re out and about.
It’s a shame but there aren’t many people at the caravan site who stay outside in the evening so we haven’t had the opportunity to get to know our fellow camp mates as yet. Bloody air con, it’s the root of all evil especially when you haven’t got it yourself!
Until tomorrow
Dar and Sar
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kangaroojack
The Ts
Monster Croc!
So that huge crocodile has not been caught yet!! He (or she I suppose) was lurking around when we were in Darwin, causing a bit of a nuisance, made headline in the Territory News. I try to let Andy go first when we walk... tee hee.... that way if there is a cobweb across the track then he gets it instead of me... but actually he grew wise to that!! Happy Travels and enjoy your rest. KJ xx