|
I spent five days at Watarrka National Park
(pronounced in "Language", I was assured by a local Aboriginal, as
"Wa-da-ka", with the same rhythm as you would pronounce modicum) or King's
Canyon for you whitefella traditionalists. Apart
from an account in "Where to Find Birds in the Northern Territory" (Donato
et al) I had no info for this area, but as an old school friend was working on
staff at the resort, I figured it was as good a place as any to start my
Centralian extravaganza.
And thank God I had my friend's floor to sleep on,
as King's Canyon Resort is the most expensive place in Central, if not all of
Australia. If you have been aghast at the prices at Yulara, well the same mob
runs King's Canyon and they up their Yulara prices by ten percent. ($26 a night
for an unpowered campsite for starters).
King's Canyon Resort is an example of getting it
almost right. The intentions are there, it just falls short in the execution.
The sullage ponds are a good example. The idea was to send all the resort's
waste to some settling ponds where the treated water would be used to maintain a
eucalypt plantation which would take out the excess nutrients and provide future
firewood for the resort. Unfortunately in practice, the ponds weren't engineered
quite right to be efficient, and the trees were planted too close together so
that they crowd each other out and can't grow properly, thereby leaving the
nutrients in the soil, and the resort still has to ship in loads of wood from
wherever.
These problems are partly due to a high rate
of staff turn over, meaning no one project gets seen through properly. The
current gardener has got the National Parks on his back and spends all his time
weeding because the previous gardener ignored this ongoing aspect. Weeds such as
Buffle Grass sweep in along the roads, and others such as Mossman Grass come in
attached to bushwalkers socks and when they get to the campsite and pick the
burrs out, quickly sprout in the disturbed grounds of the resort and threaten to
infest the park, much to the chagrin of the rangers.
Not that Parks and Wildlife Service management have
a clean slate either. They are now known locally as "Sparks and Wildfires" for
the amount of wildfires they have caused when control burns go bad. But they
have a difficult task before them, because after so many good seasons in the
Centre there has been a profusion of growth, and as it is now dying off as the
dry returns, the fuel load is phenomenal, and without fuel reduction burns, the
whole lot could go.
It was to Parks and Wildlife that I handed
over the injured Boobook I had picked up the night before. The ranger
looked distinctly unimpressed and I got the impression that he would just
as soon dash it against the nearest tree as try to rehabilitate
it. But the head ranger was a top bloke and when I was talking to him over what
was about, he agonised before letting me in on the fact that there had been a
sighting of Princess Parrot in the park within the last six months. (Pretty
vague I know, as were his directions- I guess he was pretty worried about hordes
of rabid twitchers swarming over some very sensitive habitat.) Needless to say
the bird is not there now as I spent three days in the area looking. The
habitat didn't look encouraging, but the huge amount of old seed heads on the
spinifex showed why the bird would have been there.
As a result of my flogging of this site, I didn't
spend much time around the canyon- a pity really because it is truly
spectacular. The brief climb I did yielded some of the specialties of the
Central Ranges I'd come to see- Grey-headed Honeyeater, Spinifex Pigeon
and Dusky Grasswren. The Spinifex Pigeon, which is
common around the car park, instantly became my favourite pigeon- they are just
so full of character. In the freezing early mornings (actually below zero) they
curl themselves up into a fluffy ball to keep warm, only their unicorn crests
sticking up to destroy the spherical illusion.
Out looking for the Parrots, I climbed a smallish
sandstone rise to gain my bearings. The habitat was fairly trashed- fire and
vehicle damage, with only a few scraggly spinifex hanging on. So I was pretty
surprised to find Dusky Grasswren there, and completely gobsmacked when a male
Rufous-crowned Emu-wren poked its head up. These birds aren't
supposed to be this easy, but there it was. It took a good look at me taking a
good slack-jawed look at it and then disappeared, never to be seen again.
Virtually bouncing back down the hill, a pair of Ground Cuckoo-shrike
flew into the tree above me and then driving back to the canyon, (staring down a male camel along the way) I
put the bird tape on to familiarise myself with the call of Painted Finch which
is supposed to be fairly regular at the bottom of the canyon. The tape had moved
on to Red-browed Pardalote when I stopped at the car park. I got out and slammed
the door and thought I had left the tape running. But no, in the tree above me
was a Red-browed Pardalote calling its head off. And then to
top the morning off, a Black-breasted Buzzard circled over the
road at the turn-off to the canyon.
There were other good birds on my stay there,
including Little Button-quail, Grey-crowned Babbler, White-backed Swallow,
Red-tailed Black-Cockatoo and Western Bowerbird. And even away from the grandeur
of the canyon the scenery is awesome- vast sandplains of spinifex and Desert
Oak. Definitely a great place to visit, even if you can get all the birds here
elsewhere.
|
