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Published: September 4th 2010
The day after getting back into Noumea I set off again on my next stop, Riviere Bleue national park (actually its called a regional park, what with New Caledonia really being in France and all). Although Riviere Bleue is closed on Mondays I took the Yate-bound bus on the Monday to the park. There's only one bus a day to Yate and it doesn't leave Noumea till 11.30am, so I figured it would make sense to go there the day before and pitch my tent at the nearby camp-site of Les Bois du Sud so as to be on hand to enter the park first thing in the morning. The landscape in this part of New Caledonia is all red earth and dry scrubby vegetation called maquis, rather like what Mars must have looked like before the apocalypse and not at all what one expects when heading to a rainforest!
Rather inconveniently (and once again!), you can only get easily to this best-known and most-visited of the country's national parks if you have a car. From where the bus drops you off on the highway there's first a 2.4km walk to the park HQ and then a further 10km to
get to Pont Perignon before you can get a shuttle for the next 10km to the camping area of Pont Germain where the kagu can be found. Why the shuttles don't just run all the way from the HQ I do not know. Fortunately, as has been said before, hitch-hiking is easy in New Caledonia, so you can usually (probably always) get a ride in some passing car to Pont Perignon.
The camp-site at Les Bois du Sud is quite nice, with yellow-bellied robins and green-backed white-eyes begging for hand-outs. I was the only one there. At dawn on the Tuesday I packed up and hiked back to the highway and on to the park HQ. On the way I saw my first New Caledonian parakeets, very much like the New Zealand red-crowned kakariki from which they've been split, but with noticeably yellower plumage. Then right near the junction of the highway and the road running to the park HQ I saw my first barred honeyeaters and a whistling kite, as well as various other birds I'd already seen (rainbow lorikeets, friarbirds, rufous whistler, etc). At the HQ I paid the surprisingly low fees (about NZ$7 entry and another
New Caledonian parakeet (Cyanoramphus saissetti)
photo taken at the Noumea Zoo. I did get some photos of wild birds at Riviere Bleue but they are not fit for viewing.NZ$7 for several nights camping), and then got a lift with a convoy of French people to Pont Perignon. They were only staying for one night but had boxes and boxes of food so I was hopeful of getting fed by them but they ended up at a different camping area from me. There is a very abrupt change of landscape on the way between Ponts Perignon and Germain. One minute you're driving through hell-blasted scrublands then in a literal blink-and-you-miss-it moment you're suddenly in thick verdant rainforest which immediately brought to mind the Gerald Durrell books I read as a boy in which he describes the West African rainforests as being underlain by gluggy red clay soils which exactly describes these New Caledonian ones as well.
Camping at Riviere Bleue is officially called "bivouacing" which means you are only allowed to have your tent up between the hours of 4pm and 8am. The rest of the time you have to pack up and just leave your belongings under one of the picnic tables. There's not much risk of theft so long as the bags are padlocked because as far as I could tell -- presumably to stop people
kagu (Rhynochetos jubatus)
at the Riviere Bleue national park tearing the place up in private cars -- you can only come in on the shuttle unless in a tour group so no-one is going to nick off with your stuff in their car.
Riviere Bleue is exactly the sort of place I like when I'm travelling. Get up in the morning, go wander round the forest looking for birds, go to sleep, and then repeat the next day. That is all. Nothing else to do, and nothing to spend money on. A lot of the endemic birds I had already seen at Farino so there were only a few I was specifically looking for at Riviere Bleue, the main ones being the New Caledonian imperial pigeon, the crow honeyeater and the kagu. So after getting dropped off at Pont Germain by the shuttle I set off along the road to look for birds, of which I found plenty. The Grand Kaori trail was particularly productive, giving me my first southern shrikebill in a birdwave of local passerines. I finally also managed to find New Caledonian imperial pigeons, reputedly the largest arboreal pigeon in the world (their specific name is
goliath which speaks for itself) and they really are
most magnificent birds. These are actually locally-common in most of the island's forests, although declining due to hunting, and they can be heard calling where-ever you are but like many forest-dwelling pigeons they can be difficult to actually see because they spend most of each day just sitting motionless in the canopy pretending not to be there at all. Finally for the day, after I'd set up my tent and was writing up notes, a kagu came wandering out of the forest and started feeding on the campsite lawn. The kagu is what most visiting birders want to see. They are quite rare -- about 1000 birds or so -- and over half the remaining population lives right here in Riviere Bleue. Honestly, though, the kagu was a bit of an anticlimax. It is a most peculiar bird but at the same time it has a sort of wierd "familiar" look to it, rather like a cross between a seagull and a spur-winged plover. I thought at the time it was the 1000th bird I'd seen in the wild but it later turned out that I hadn't seen long-tailed triller before so in fact the kagu comes out as number
1001 (on my current list, until taxonomic changes shuffle it again). A kagu I found the next day in the forest - where it should be seen - was a much better experience, so I think the campground surroundings had something to do with the unexciting aspect to today's kagu. A short night walk produced a knob-headed giant gecko (
Rhacodactylus auriculatus) up in a tree which I was most elated about. Its not the best time of year for finding geckos; apparently in summer they're all over the roads as males go searching for females.
All-in-all my most favourite bird of all the ones I saw in New Caledonia wasn't the cloven-feathered dove or the horned parakeet or the kagu; it was the crow honeyeater. This huge black honeyeater is such a rare and reclusive bird that many birders fail to see it and so, given my general crapness at finding birds, I wouldn't have been at all surprised if I had done likewise. On the morning of my second day at the park while walking the road looking to see what was about, a harsh call attracted my attention and a big black blur shot across the road
and disappeared into the forest. I knew what it had to be, mainly because I'd already seen all the other big black birds and it wasn't any of those, but at the same time it was just a whirr of feathery darkness, so it didn't get noted down as "seen: crow honeyeater". Fortunately just a couple of hours later, right near the entrance to the Grand Kaori trail, further calls alerted me to the presence of more of the birds and I found a pair of them chasing each other between the trees and got several minutes of stop-start viewing. Far and away the best bird New Caledonia has to offer in my opinion, exceeding the kagu many-fold. They're not the most attractive or colourful of birds -- in fact they're all black apart for the red facial skin that flares out in the forest gloom, they're about the size of a crow, and they have the heavy flight of a demon-spawned pheasant as if they're afraid of falling out of the sky -- but they have more charisma in one primary feather than most birds do in their entire body.
Back at the camp-site I ran into Francois
from Caledonia Tours, there with an Australian tourism journalist, and he invited me to join them for lunch. Top notch bloke he is. So instead of bread and cold sardines I had barbecued wild pig sausages, wild venison, prawns, couscous and coffee. And then he left me the left-over food as well because he didn't want to take it back with him.
I had been going to stay at Riviere Bleue for a few more days but seeing as how I'd found both the kagu and the crow honeyeater in double-quick time I decided to go back to Noumea early to see what else I could squeeze into my trip (not a lot as it turned out). Funnily enough I saw a fourth crow honeyeater the next morning while waiting for the shuttle, in a tree on the opposite bank of the river. It was a fairly distant view but the bright facial skin made it easily identifiable. I made what may have been a strategic error in heading out of the park in the morning when all the visitors were coming in rather than later in the day when there was more chance of getting a lift, but
palm tree in forest at Riviere Bleue
the new leaf coming up on this common species of palm was always bright red, standing out like a searchlight in the gloom of the forest it turned out fine. After no more than ten minutes walking from the shuttle drop-off I was picked up by a couple of park surveyors who took me out to the highway, and after just six minutes wait I was picked up by a passing mining truck. Hitching really is very easy in New Caledonia, even if you don't speak a lick of French. It was a good thing I left Riviere Bleue early as it happened, because yet another big storm rolled on through that night and then it rained non-stop all through the next day.
Funny observation number three: at Riviere Bleue I met an Italian couple doing a birding trip around the Pacific. Their itinerary? Three days in New Caledonia, two in Samoa and two in Tonga. That's it. They had no field guides, no idea of what birds were on the islands, and no idea of sites to find the birds. Just wierd.
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