On to Kakadu!

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Antibiotics really are great. It will be a shame when they stop working. I suppose we'll just have to go back to dying of dysentry and bacterial infections and things, bacteriophages pending. Not that the antibiotics have instantly cured me, but I'm definitely improving at this point and not getting worse.

We headed off in the morning for the town of Jabiru in Kakadu National Park where we will be staying for three nights. The drive was very interesting through open bushland with rocky escarpments and lots of massive termite mounds. Plenty of Blue-winged Kookaburras along the way too which are nice as well as various other birds and some feral water buffalo. I was keeping an eye open for Australian Bustards which would be a really nice bird, but didn't see any on the drive in.

In Jabiru we're staying in a really fancy hotel that's shaped like a crocodile which is cool looking. It's the sort of place that I could never afford when travelling on my own means but it's brilliant when someone else is paying :D. We've got three nights here which should be enough time to explore Kakadu National Park and hopefully find all the endemic sandstone escarpment birds and mammals that are the top targets for Kakadu.

We got to the hotel by about midday with a couple of brief stops along the way, and after lunch at the hotel, headed down to one of the birding sites that are dotted around the park, Yellow Waters/Cooinda. The main thing to do here is a morning cruise on the wetlands at sunrise which is supposed to be good for birds, so we booked that and then had a look around the area a bit. There were some of the common wetland birds around as well as a few interesting new ones like a Red Goshawk which is quite rare and I thing I saw a possible one on the drive too. There were also some feral animals around: lots of fetal horses or Brumbies as well as some feral cattle. I guy working there said they were a properly established feral population in Kakadu so I'll list them pending other news, but I had initially assumed they would just be single escapees. I also had seen feral Water Buffalo on the drive up.

We then headed back towards Jabiru, stopping at a site called Nourlangie Rock on the way. This is an area of massive rocky outcrops with one huge impressive rock dominating and is supposed to be a good site for some of the local endemic birds as well as the local endemic Black Wallaroo. I got a few of the endemic birds like the rock pigeon and fruit dove, though I'm hoping for better views and photos another day, and didn't see the wallaroo. We were just there for an hour and a bit though and will be back. There is also quite a lot of aboriginal rock art around here which is the main attraction for most people and is actually really cool to look at. The signs say that some of it is over a thousand years old, and there's quite a bit of well preserved rock art.

After dinner back at the hotel, I went for a bit of spotlighting (on my own for this bit, but that's not really relevant) There's a nice track nearby that goes into the bushland. In the trees near the hotel was a Northern Brushtail Possum as well as heaps of Black Flying Foxes. Also loads of cane toads. Apparently before cane toads reached Kakadu in the early 2000s, a lot of small mammals were quite easy. Quolls were possible, and rabbit-rats and phascogales were apparently near-guaranteed just around Jabiru. Now they're entirely gone and almost entirely disappeared from Kakadu as a whole. Along the bush track by far the most commonly seen animal were cane toads and all you could hear was their hopping on the leaf litter. Really sad. I was practically stepping on them, and unlike when I write that hyperbolically, this was literally almost stepping on several. I could hear a dog barking too which always worries me when spotlighting. Domestic dogs will attack. There are supposed to be dingoes common around Jabiru too, but they don't worry me. They'll run away. I don't think dingoes bark like domestic dogs either. I thought I might find sugar gliders or Northern Brown Bandicoots or maybe some wallaby things but no such luck. (All those on the list were seen in the day/evening). Cane toads are stupid though. One massive one sat in the middle of the path and let me prod its side with my boot for a while. They don't seem to mind, or notice. Then eventually it hopped away and went head first into a tree trunk. Not huge numbers of microbats around, not compared the rainforest at least but that's not surprising. More megabats. The forest is far far quieter too but again not surprising. The nicest sound or at least most interesting are the wails of the stone curlews which would be pretty scary if you didn't know what they were. Beautiful night sky and milky way too. In Malaysia there were generally clouds obscuring the stars and I only got nice clear views of the stars a couple of times like on one of the nights on the Kinabatangan. I just spent a couple of hours spotlighting. Cane toads, cane toads, cane toads. It seems much worse here than in FNQ where I have seen them before.



Black-necked Stork

Torresian Crow

Red Goshawk

White-lined Honeyeater

Dusky Moorhen

Leaden Flycatcher

Swamp Harrier

Grey Goshawk

Golden-headed Cisticola

Chestnut-quilled Rock-pigeon

Banded Fruit-dove

Partridge Pigeon



Feral Water Buffalo

Antilopine Wallaroo

Feral Cattle

Feral Horse

Agile Wallaby

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