Advertisement
Nu'utele Island
as seen from the beach at Taufua Beach Fales. It is quite steep. Access to Nu’utele Island is only possible from Lalomanu at high tide because the reef has no channel so the sea needs to be high enough for the boat to ride above the reef. Fortunately the high tide today was at 8am, perfect for going birding. An Austrian chap called Walter from the place I was staying was also interested in going to the island for no real reason, so in the morning Foki picked us up and we set off in his little tin boat. I’m a bit erratic when it comes to sea-sickness: sometimes I don’t get it at all, and sometimes I get it bad. It’s only about thirty minutes across to Nu’utele’s beach but I was already feeling pretty queasy by the time we got there.
I was going looking for the tooth-billed pigeon, a long shot if ever there was one because it is rarely seen and I would only have a couple of hours on the island due to needing to leave to get back across the reef before the tide fell too low. The best thing to do really would be to sleep on the island for a few nights to
Foki's boat
the island in the back is the smaller one behind Nu'utele. You can just see the left-most tip of Nu'utele poking out in front of it. get the most of your time, but I didn’t have that option (next time though!). Although the island is uninhabited there is a little house there used by teams who go over every so often to lay poison baits in an attempt to wipe out the rats on the island, so it is possible to stay there even if you don’t have a tent. Foki said he takes tourists to the island a few times a year but otherwise the locals steer clear of it. Apparently fishermen off the coast at night hear babies crying and people talking in the darkness. To me that says petrels and shearwaters but most people were aghast that I would even contemplate staying on the island, especially by myself. It is a bad place.
The beach is fringed with a wall of coconut palms with scrubby vegetation behind, extensively dug over by feral pigs of which we saw a lot, and then real forest up the slopes. There used to be a rough track up to the rim of the caldera but it no longer seems to exist. Foki had come ashore with us to show us the way but unfortunately
we basically ended up walking in at least one circle (we passed the same roosting fruit bat twice), and by the time he found where the trail should have been the tides were changing and we had to leave. There are loads of birds of all sorts on the island, they were calling all around us, but the bush was so thick that it was near-impossible to see anything. We never did manage to progress much up towards the top of the island and needless to say we did not see any tooth-billed pigeons. I didn’t even see any shy ground doves which are meant to be common on the island (apparently it is the only place in Samoa where they occur), but I guess they live up to their name just as much here as they do in Fiji where I have also failed to see them! A return trip with a proper length of stay on the island is definitely in order!!
After launching off the beach we motored round to the back of the island. The cliffs here were thronged with clouds of noddies, although I’ll be jiggered if I know how to ID them properly! Most appeared to be brown noddies. There were probably “smaller and darker” ones in there which would be black noddies but I couldn’t say. There were also white terns and brown boobies. No doubt others as well, almost certainly masked and red-footed boobies, but I was starting to feel really nauseous again so couldn’t use my binoculars without wanting to throw up. I made do with the seabirds that were close enough to see with the naked eye!
We headed to the smaller island that lay beyond Nu’utele where Foki hoped to show me storm petrels in some clefts in the cliffs, but they weren’t there. The first birders he had taken out some years before were looking for an all-dark form of Polynesian storm petrel and when they found some on those cliffs they were so happy, said Foki, that it was like they had won a lottery! He didn’t understand it at all; they were just little birds. The next birders to come by just wanted to see those storm petrels, so he took them straight there, they took some photos, and then back to shore. Birders are a weird lot. The sea out round the islands was very rough and I was getting really sick. I was glad when I got back to dry land again!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.365s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 26; qc: 129; dbt: 0.1963s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.4mb