Flight to Perth and First Day

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I left Warsaw on the afternoon of the 5th of June on an Emirates flight to Dubai. Emirates was very good as usual and I was quite lucky on my flight to have an empty seat next to me. It was my first time flying completely by myself, but I had no problems at all with anything. I had transferred through Dubai many times before and that day's transfer was uneventful. No one had any problems with a 16 year old travelling unaccompanied, though one person at the gate before boarding my second flight from Dubai to Perth asked in a questioning voice if I was by myself. I said I was and he just checked me onto the plane without wanting any evidence that I had permission from my parents or that I was being met by someone in Australia and not going to end up on the street. No one on the Australian end bothered me at all either and at immigration I was able to just use the smart gates to enter and I arrived in Australia on the evening of the 6th. My flight landed slightly early at around 5 PM though it took a while to get off the plane because a person sitting in the row in front of me was unwell and had been on oxygen for the last few hours of the flight and had to be taken off the plane by ambulance.

The next day I lay in bed until late, tired and jet-lagged after a long flight and didn’t get up and have breakfast until gone ten. I was staying in the Perth Hills with my aunt and grandmother so I didn’t do much that afternoon apart from some very local birding, and they had saved all of their problems with electronics for me to sort out. Around four-ish though we went for an evening bird walk in the nearby Kalamunda National Park. Most of the stuff seen was fairly common but I gained two lifers which were Weebill and Square-tailed Kite, however I suspect those being lifers would be due to how much more into birding since I last visited Perth two years ago when I didn’t have binoculars and couldn’t be bothered struggling to identify a bird if it wasn’t obvious. At least that's what I thought when I saw them then, actually now that I think about it more, I haven't seen either of those two bird species again so maybe they were quite unusual after all...

Anyway, I enjoyed my first bit of Australian birding in the stunning surroundings of Kalamunda National Park which is quite hilly with lots of big impressive boulders and little streams and very pretty Eucalyptus forest.



Birds seen:

Australian Magpie

Australian Ringneck Parrot

Australian Raven



New Holland Honeyeater

Magpie Lark

Galah

Australian White Ibis

Carnaby's White-tailed Black Cockatoo

Rainbow Lorikeet

Square-tailed Kite

Singing Honeyeater

Spotted Pardalote

Rufous Whistler

Grey Fantail

Weebill

Striated Pardalote

Red-tailed Black Cockatoo

Laughing Kookaburra

Little Crow





That evening we went for some spotlighting in an area where Western Quolls are supposed to occur, however my aunt was worried that people would vandalise her car in the car park and she and my grandmother were both worried about stupid stuff so we ended up spotlighting for less than half an hour, most of which was actually before sunset. Sigh. Never mind. With a six hour time difference between Warsaw and Perth I tossed and turned in bed a bit that night but I got to sleep eventually. Although the outside temperature during a Perth winter isn’t particularly cold - only just getting into the low positives on cold nights and getting into double digits in the day - the inside aren’t very warm compared to Poland where buildings are heated a ridiculous amount, and my aunt who I was staying with doesn’t heat her house at all (and also worries about heaters starting a fire) so for the first time in a long while I had to sleep with a jumper on and the inside of the building, not warmed by the sun at all, was colder than outside during the day, or the same temperature during the night! I shouldn't complain though because very soon I adapted from a hot Warsaw summer to a slightly chilly Perth winter and in a few days I was off to Queensland anyway.

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