Dear Birding Aussers,
I am back in Tromsø, Norway, after our great Australian
holidays. We had a wonderful trip, so full of impressions that I fear it will
be hard to write about them, as all memories have a tendency to intermix so
that I have problems remembering exactly what I did and saw where. Riet and I
started out in Bargara Beach near Bundaberg, Queensland, where Jill Dening had
been extremely helpful in finding and even booking an excellent place to be,
Sandcastles-on-the-Beach for a week; here we met my daughter Anna and family,
who are sailing around the world on their 32fr Ægir, and were just in time for
the first steps of little Sigurd, my grandson.
On 1 Augustus we flew to Cairns and met up with the Bradburys
(Adelaide) and the Krapps(Bonn, Germany), with whom we spent the rest of the
month, everything having been excellently and in detail organized beforehand by
Robyn and john Bradbury. We drove around for a week in the surroundings of
Cairns, there as everytwhere greatly assisted bu\y Birding Aussers, many of
whom we had the pleasure to meet in person (Those I met during the first days
must have found mne a quite dour person, as because of a painful throat problem
I could hardly speak those days). We were on the Daintree River boat trip with
Chris Dahlberg (Wonderful with the slowly rising morning mists on the river,
and the large flocks of Cattle Egrets following the river, no doubt en route
from a communal roost to their foraging fields), we spent productive days at
Red Mill House at Daintree and at Julatten, and one of the absolute highlights
of the tour was the day that Alan Gillanders made time to show us around, in
spite of great stress just before his next tours and a burst waterpipe at home;
we are extremely grateful to you, Alan!. Later at Chambers and L.Eacham, the
full amount of destruction after cyclone Larry was brought forcefully home to
us; even as a biologist I find it not easy to look at this as a fully natural
event, part of the eternal chain of successions and desctruction in the
rainforest.
From Cairns we flew to Darwin, where we rented a 4WD, and drove
via Kakadu and Katherine to the famous Gibb River Road, which was exactly as
3-dimensional as we had read about beforehand; some of the hills in the
road-surface almost deserve a name! But of course the Kimberley fascinated us
as it does almost everybody; pity only that we had too little time, so that our
visit got a quite 'touristy' character. Ours was not a birding trip, as most of
our people were not birders at all, so I had to watch bird where we happened to
be, rather than being able always to go there where I could hope for most
birds. Still, I came home with some 15 new lifebirds. Several of those came on
the last leg of our trip, the week in Broome, first a few days at Cable Beach
(indeed a most impressive sandy beach, and for people accustomed to Dutch
beaches not crowded at all), and then at the Bromme Bird Observatory, a plce to
relax amidst a great diversity, as wll as large numbers, of birds; however, for
a marine biologist as me the spectacular Fiddler Crabs and Mudskippers
constituted a serious distraction from the birding. Also here I met several
Birding Aussers, who were of great help, as well as Birdchatter Barry Levine
from Seattle; the world is definitely getting smaller!
During this entire trip and the preparations I have got a lot of
help from you people , and this has certainly contributed a lot towards making
it the success it has become. Tusen Takk!! (= thousand thanks, the normal
Norwegian way of expressing great gratitude) to asll of you, and still more til
Jill Dening and Alan Gillanders.
I'll make up a annotated bird list from the trip, which will be
available for interested people. But as I said, this was not primarily a
birding trip, and it will primarily show, I fear, all the chances we missed.
The list will have c 150 species (I have not yet toted them up precisely)
Wim
Vader, Tromsø Museum
9037
Tromsø, Norway
==============================www.birding-aus.org
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