Melaleuca, parrot town

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The bus from Launceston to Hobart took about two hours. Yes, that's how small Tasmania actually is. I stayed the night at Central City Backpackers, which I liked for its apparent hiring policy of only employing hot girls. Renee at the desk acted as my information officer telling me all the bus timetables etc I would need while in the area. In the morning I walked to the Botanic Gardens (being Tasmania there isn't any public transport to get there!), spotting the endemic yellow wattlebird along the way. Yellow wattlebirds are big honeyeaters with long dangly wattles on the throat. Their call sounds like they're vomiting but I thought they were really nice birds. The main reason for going to the Gardens was to see the Subantarctic Plant House, which was really excellent, with plants from Macquarie and Campbell Islands down in the endless winter region near Antarctica. There was a soundtrack playing in the house of the bowel-gurgling mating calls of elephant seals. On the way to the Gardens I happened past the site of the old Beaumaris Zoo which closed in 1937 but which is famous as being where the last known thylacine ("Tasmanian tiger") ended its days. The gate in the photo isn't the original gate (which was located further along the fenceline to the right). Some of the original structures can still be seen though, including the polar bear cage (about the size of your average bedroom) and an hourglass-shaped duckpond.

After that little wander I set off to the airport for a flight to Melaleuca in the remote southwest wilderness. How remote? Melaleuca has a permanent population of two people! The reason most people go through Melaleuca is because it a pit-stop along one of the hiking trails. The reason people like me go there is because a very rare little bird called the orange-bellied parrot breeds there. There are only about 150 or 200 of the parrots in the entire world and they breed only in southwest Tasmania, migrating to southern Australia outside of the breeding season. To try and get their numbers up, supplementary feeding is undertaken at Melaleuca so more chicks can be reared. At this time the number of residents in Melaleuca swells to four, with pairs of volunteers taking two-week shifts to keep the feeding-table stocked and recording the numbers of birds. Another much sought after bird in the region is the ground parrot, which is a parrot that lives on the ground (this is one of those names like red-bellied black snake). They are solitary and probably largely crepuscular (active at dawn and dusk), and everything I had read or heard told me that they were very difficult birds to find or see. But I still wanted to try. Now there are two ways of getting to Melaleuca. You can walk in, which takes up to a week (or, if you're anything like me, a month), or you can fly in. Par Avion does regular flights down there to drop off or pick up bushwalkers, or to take tourists on scenic flights. Walking is free which is good but involves walking which isn't so good. Flying costs $300 return but it makes things simple. So I flew in. The plane was a weeny little six-seater Cessna. I sat in the front next to the pilot but I wasn't allowed to play with the controls while in flight, which was difficult. Once there I had been expecting to be roughing it in my useless little tent, but it turned out that there were walkers' huts there for free use.

Melaleuca has scattered patches of scrub here and there but in the main its just rolling hills covered in a mosaic of dry and swampy buttongrass peat moorland, carpeted everywhere with the burrow-holes of burrowing crayfish endemic to southwest Tasmania that just sit down in their burrows (presumably below the water-table) feeding on dead plant matter and the roots of plants that come into their burrows. Apparently the active burrows are the ones with the mud battlements built up around the entrance. First stop for me upon arrival, naturally, was the bird hide overlooking the feeding-table. Really, seeing orange-bellied parrots isn't hard at all. You just pay for the flight, then go to the hide and there they are. At one point during my stay there were ten parrots on the table at once. As a bonus the table is also visited by beautiful firetails which are little finches with fiery red tails and bandit masks, as well as green rosellas which are a type of endemic parrot. Outside the hut I occupied I found two more endemic birds, the strong-billed honeyeater and the yellow-throated honeyeater (which looks like he's been playing with a pot of yellow paint). There were lots of new birds for me to find in the area, the best of which on that first day were the emu-wrens, which are a bit like the superb wrens in shape but the tail looks like someone has replaced the real feathers with a bunch of raggedy emu feathers. They were too nippy to get photos of though.

The next day I went off in search of the ground parrot. I had been anticipating spending days searching and was only half expecting to even glimpse one, but one of the bird volunteers there told me she'd seen three on the track to Cox Bight the day before, and that really they're not difficult to find in this particular place. Hopes carefully raised, off I went to Cox Bight. The track is about 12km long and I saw not one, not two, but FOUR ground parrots!! The first one, seen after only about forty minutes, did the typical thing I had been expecting, namely flushing from the side of the track, flying for about ten metres, then dropping back into the heath. I suspect that on landing they then scuttle as fast as they can along the ground into hiding because there was no sign of it when I rushed to the spot (and when I say "rushed" I mean "picked my way carefully through the boggy marsh") The second bird, about thirty minutes later, was completely different. It flew up from the right side of the track and plonked down again on the left side about two feet away from me, and then just sat there and looked at me, tilting its head onto the side in the amusing way parrots do when they're trying to puzzle something out. It was extremely beautiful, very much like a miniature kakapo in some ways but darker green with a red band between the eyes. Absolutely stunning and my new all-time favourite bird, knocking the superb lyrebird from first place (which had taken over from golden dove, which had taken over from orange dove, which had taken over from rock wren). Its going to have to be a pretty special bird to replace ground parrot at the top. Anyway, I gawped at it for what was probably only about ten seconds but seemed much longer, then it casually strolled off into the grass while I belatedly and futilely struggled to take its photo. Awesome sighting. The third parrot was another up-and-away bird, aided in an even faster escape by a strong wind that had picked up. The fourth paused for a few seconds allowing some poor photos to be quickly snapped (a magnifying glass might come in handy when trying to see it in the photo -- they are very well camouflaged!). But four ground parrots in one day when I was hardly even expecting to see one, I think its fair to say I was one very happy chappy (you might even say I had had a Jammy Pete day!). I definitely now consider the airfare down here to be very well spent.

On the third day I returned to the Cox Bight track to see if I could manage to get any half-decent shots of the ground parrots and emu-wrens. I flushed two separate ground parrots within the first ten minutes, right at the start of the track, but then nothing after that. Of course that may have had something to do with the weather taking a turn for the worse -- for the much worse! Its the first bad weather I've had since Sydney. It rolled in about half way through the walk. I continued for a while but it just got too ridiculous so I returned to camp. And in case you're wondering, no its not much fun walking head-on into a howling rain-storm for an hour and a half!

That night a swamp rat tried to steal one of my water bottles. Swamp rat isn't a very appealing name for a most appealing little creature. I could hear him in the dark gnawing on the bottle top but as soon as I moved to switch on the torch he'd have vanished, leaving just the bottle rocking from side to side. So I left the torch on and waited (I've got a red filter on it so as to watch nocturnal critters unawares). Slowly he snuck back and started at the bottle again, then tried to drag it away across the floor until I took it back and hung the bottles up in a bag so he couldn't take them. He was so cute. But not as cute as the broad-toothed rat seen earlier the same morning. He was as round and fat as a chocolate-covered tennis ball. I also saw a few pademelons and a couple of Bennett's wallabies around the camp. There were lots of wombats around judging by the number of droppings but I didn't see any (and I wondered where they slept seeing the ground was so soggy). One last mammal I missed was the pigmy possum living in one of the cupboards in the bird hide. He had been scared away by being shown to too many visitors and had left for quieter quarters.

The next day (today) I flew back to Hobart, a day earlier than planned but I had accomplished what I had set out there for. A very good few days for me.

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Photos

site of the old Beaumaris Zoo
the concrete structure visible behind the top right part of the sign (behind the peacock) is the old polar bear cage

ground parrot (Pezoporus wallicus)
look VERY carefully. It's to the right of the track and to the left of the pink-flowered plant

ground parrot
a blow-up from the preceding photo so you can see what it actually looks like!

Comments

[Divey Spidey]

Why would a rat be wanting a water bottle???

[Scary Israel]

there had been juice in the bottle. I think he liked the taste.