Saturday, 5 March 2016

Wandering Dutchman wanders to East Gippsland

Then it was time for the trip to commence. Heath used his mum's car for a bit whilst Robert and I followed in the supply truck, my 70 series Landcruiser, packed to the gunnels with stuff. Robert was keen to see Lakes Entrance so we detoured there and parked up at the parking area on Bullock Island looking towards The Entrance. It was raining a bit, too much to have any enthusiasm for getting out of the car. We spotted a pod of dolphins slowly coming towards us through the entrance from the ocean and a small group of Australian Furseals [residents] also playing around. There were many Great Cormorants and Australian Pelicans sitting/sleeping/resting/preening on the woodwork of the entrance by Cunningham Arm. Suddenly they all took off and a feeding frenzy started right in front of us. It seemed the dolphins had been following food/fish coming in from the ocean driving the food source in front of them. Well, everybody got in the action. The pelicans mainly trying to "strong-arm" caught fish from the cormorants and the cormorants dive-bombing the food with dolphins and seals in the midst of it all. This went on for about 10 minutes gradually coming further into Lake King. The images were taken through the windscreen; not brilliant but give you a feel for the action.

Dolphin and seals
General Mayhem with dolphin to the left
We then left for further east and camped at Tamboon Inlet. The next morning there were plenty of birds around the camp.

Eastern Yellow Robin
This could be a male Satin Flycatcher although the accompanying female look like a Leaden Flycatcher
Twitch of the breakfast was a Crested Shrike-tit. A pair hung around for the best part of an hour allowing many photo-opportunities but none of them in decent light.






After breakfast and breaking camp, we headed a few kilometres to the east to Clinton Rocks and the reason for coming to this neck of the woods. Wandering Tattler.


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