Kakadu - The Top End - Part Two

1 May 2015 -

White-bellied Sea-eagle, easy to see at Yellow Water, Kakadu National Park - 3 May 2015

After our peaceful encounter with the Freshwater Croc (I have now made up my mind about its ID), we drove across a flat landscape into Kakadu National Park, Australia's largest national park (most Australian national parks are wee things). We stopped for the night inside the park at a mostly empty rv park (Aurora Kakado Hotel and Caravan Camping) which I remember for three reasons:

1. Gone were the well tended lawns, paved streets, swimming pools and complimentary drinks tickets of the Free Spirit RV Park of Darwin. In their places was a washroom block with taps leaking away the aquifer, pretty Green Tree-frogs clinging to the rounded contours of the sinks and toilets, and a large snag in the centre of the dusty, gravelly area where we were to park for the night. From the snag a Whistling Kite called noisily and frequently until darkness put an end to his bit of drama. However, at the first hint of dawn he started up again, this time with an equally vociferous partner.

2. When I took a short walk back toward the highway, I found an unpaved road from which a dingo promptly vanished into the bush. About 4 hours later several dingos close in gave us a lovely loud chorus under the almost full moon.  I am a canid fan so this was a real treat for me. Nothing caps a day in the field better than wolves howling, coyotes yipping, or dingos crying in the bush.

3. A Channel-billed Cuckoo flopped from treetop to treetop along the unpaved road, one of few seen this trip. I had become familiar with these huge from New South Wales' Blue Mountains especially in the Austral late spring and summer, October-December, when, as so many cuckoos do, the Channel-bills parasitize other birds, laying their eggs in the nests of Pied Currawongs, Australian Magpies and Torresian Crows (Pizzey and Knight, 9th ed. 2012). Its Latin name is Scythrops novaehollandiae, "angry-faced New Holland bird". Latham, the taxonomist responsible for naming it, may have been justified in appying such a name since a captive Channel-bill he tried to tame kept biting him (Fraser and Gray 2013).

Other birds around the rv park included White-throated, White-gaped, Rufous-banded, and Dusky honeyeaters, Pied Imperial Pigeon, Grey Whistler, Arafura Fantail, Little Corella, Sulphur-crested Cockatoo, Galah, Varied Triller, and Broad-billed Flycatcher.


2 May 2015

Our first stop was Mamukala Wetland Lookout, which was underwhelming, given its dryness. However, in addition to two Horsfield's Bronze-Cuckoos, a Little Bronze-Cuckoo popped up close in front of me, so close I was able to see its red eyering, lack of mask and shiny green upperparts. In general when it came to differentiating the three species of bronze-cuckoos, I was a slow learner. I couldn't keep their names straight for one thing, which makes ID impossible. Now (March 2016) I don't know what the problem could have been. Differentiating the three species seems straight forward. All of the major field guides even agree as to the common names, which is not always the case with Aussie birds.

One of the joys of Territorial birding is the presence of Red-tailed Black Cockatoos, huge black parrots with red panels in their long black tails.  Two flew over with slow wingbeats as we were about to leave Mamukala Lookout. Long, powerful wings sweep up and down in what Pizzey and Knight term "majestic" beats; how true!

Red-tailed Black Cockatoos over the Northern Territory - April, 2015

As we drove along the Arnhem Highway between Mamukala and Jabiru, the familiar birder's dilemma asserted itself, the need to make actual progress down the road VS the very strong desire to stop and beat the bushes (not literally) for all those birds and mammals you just know you're missing as you pass one possible pull-off after another. I was heartened to glimpse two Blue-winged Kookaburras, the pale-eyed cousin of the nationally symbolic Laughing Kookaburra. (Notice how I avoided the use of a certain word starting with i that has become so overused that is now meaningless. Why just the other day I saw a magazine article entitled "Unknown Icons". Wait a minute. If it's unknown, it can't be bloody iconic, can it, mate?)

At Bowali Visitors Centre out walked the easiest life bird of the trip. Two of them: a pair of Partridge Pigeons, in the words of Pizzey and Knight (2012) "squat, dull-brown ...with distinctive head pattern" in our case, the bare red skin in a sort of arcing mask around the pale, clueless eye. These birds, perhaps a male and a female, were obviously looking for handouts, the way Rock Pigeons do the world over. Given the harsh uncertainty, the drought and flood, the boom and bust of the climate of the Northern Territory, begging from tourists may be a wise investment of time, especially when you look as harmless as a pale-eyed turnip.

The Partridge Pigeon's Latin, bestowed upon it by a Mr. G.R. Gray in 1840, is Geophaps smithii. Geo is Greek for "earth" and phaps is Greek for "wild pigeon", perhaps an onomatopoetic rendering of the sound of pigeons' wings. I'm guessing.

The generic Geophaps is plain but at least it's not insulting. The maligned cuckoo-doves of the shadowy forests of the east coast of Australia have to put up with "Macropygia" for a first name, Greek for "big bum". While admittedly worth a giggle if you're as immature as I am, not only is "big bum" politely incorrect, its also inaccurate since the lovely coppery brown feathers of the Brown Cuckoo-Dove do NOT make the bird's ass look big.   Pizzey and Knight (2012) seem to agree with me, calling the cuckoo-dove a "graceful, long-tailed pigeon".

The Partridge Pigeon, pale-eyed beggar at Bowali Visitors Centre, 2 May 2015. 

"Does my pygia look macro like this?" ponders a Brown Cuckoo-Dove at Mapleton, Queensland, April, 2015

We stopped briefly at a wetland just off the highway next to the Malabanjbandjdju Caravan Camping pull-off and had a taste of the birding to come the next day at Yellow Water: Comb-crested Jacanas stalked over the lily pads, egrets stood around the edges while a Whistling Kite competed with three Wandering Whistling Duck in whistling. A Brown Falcon flew past as did three Red-collared Lorikeets and a flock of 40 Little Corellas. Just off the side of the highway I discovered the only nightjar I was to see during the entire 2015 trip, a flat and sun-dried, and very deceased Spotted Nightjar.

We camped at Cooindra, a resort next to the permanent billabong, Yellow Water, where the next dawn we boarded a tourist boat with bench seat and an cheerful, casual Australian guide who kept a running monologue of information about the billabong and its abundant birds. Check any book that lists the best birding spots in the world, such as Dominic Couzens' Top 100 Birding Sites of the World and you will find Yellow Water, possibly listed as "Kakadu" or some variation thereof. This long, marshy water hole is home to "heaps and heaps", to use the Aussie expression, of tropical birdlife. Depending upon the timing of the two seasons of the NT, the wet and the dry, you may see hundreds if not thousands of water birds including the species that we saw this day: Great, Intermediate (up to 90,000 some years), Cattle and Little egrets, Pied Herons, Rufous Night Herons, and if you are luckier than we were, the rare Black Bittern. Alongside them are wheezing throngs of Plumed Whistling Ducks, Pacific Black Ducks, Green Pygmy Geese (among the tiniest waterfowl in the world), and thousands of the huge, primitive looking Magpie Goose. The Black-necked Stork a satiny-black and white giant standing 1.4 m tall, wields a sharply pointed sturdy glossy black bill, and has a long glossy neck, black and white body, short black tail and long bright red legs. A huge stick inverted mound in a snag is a stork's nest  visible from the boat. Also huge are the White-bellied Sea-eagles that have become quite habituated to the tourist boat and will perch close overhead, allowing photography even with cell phones.

The beginning of the Yellow Water boat tour - dawn, 3 May 2015

By the end of the two hour boat ride, I had listed 31 species of birds including Azure Kingfisher, a little beauty of a bird, bright red-faced Crimson Finches, Rainbow Bee-eaters, White-breasted Woodswallows, Forest Kingfisher, as well as Darters, Whiskered Terns, Glossy Ibis and other wetland birds.

Black-necked Stork in the fierce NT sun, 1 May 2015, Fogg Dam.

 After the substantial breakfast that is included in the tour price, we headed to nearby Nourlangie Rock, an outlying bit of the Arnhem Escarpment. Much of the exposed sandstone is covered with hundreds of Aboriginal paintings, some possibly depicting the origin of thunder. A boardwalk constructed to bring the tourist close to the rock art winds up and over some of the "best", most colorful designs. Of course for those of us who are not of Aboriginal descent, the best we can do is try to remember what we have seen of the art and to do some research afterwards.

Nourlangie Rock is home to the Banded Fruit Dove, a small, shy pigeon that most often perches quite still, when not feeding, overlooking clueless birders like me who unknowingly walk beneath it, the pigeon invisible to my sun-dazzled eyes because of its shadow-and-light, black-and-white plumage. I'm sure I must have walked beneath a few during our hour at the site.

As we were about to leave, the last people at the site at that time, a Great Bowerbird popped out of nowhere to land on the beaten path. Unlike the brightly coloured male Satin, Regent, and Golden bowerbirds, the Great Bowerbird is much more subdued in plumage, being a soft gray-brown with pale spots. However, it makes up for lack of vivid hue by making itself obvious, my kind of bird. No mistaking this guy for a shadow in the canopy, no way. The Great Bowerbird, to paraphrase Pizzey and Knight (2012) bounds about, active and inquisitive. Its flight is undulating. When the male displays, he does knee bends, grabs objects in his bill, ruffles his feathers and cocks his tail. Just in case you're looking elsewhere, he re-directs your attention to him by hissing like a little gray-brown steam engine, lowering his head and spreading his small pink crest. What a bird!

Great Bowerbird going into a knee bend - Pine Creek, NT - 4 May 2015.

We drove east through Jabiru toward the mis-named Alligator River and Cahill's Crossing, which is a shallow place atop a dam. Just downstream people were spending a warm. calm slightly buggy Sunday afternoon fishing. These were the genuine human inhabitants of Kakadu

Fishing below Cahill's Crossing. Alligator River, Kakadu National Park - 3 May 2015

After a humid afternoon in which I spotted both Little Friarbirds and Silver-crowned Friarbirds around the campground, we spent a hot night sealed inside the van because of the voracious mosquitoes. The heat re-activated our chigger welts so we weren't bored, always having insane itches to scratch somewhere on our motley hides.

Our plan was to rise before dawn to hike over the sandstone outcrops near Cahill's Crossing for any of the sandstone endemics, including the Chestnut-quilled Rock Pigeon and the Sandstone Rock Thrush. Perhaps because of last night's short, uncomfortable sleep, we dipped on both thrush and pigeon. A Pallid Cuckoo flew by, a couple of Sulphur-crested Cockatoos hung around a tall snag, and a Short-eared Rock Wallaby stuck around long enough to get on my mammal life list, but we had come all this way and didn't see the birds for which the area was famous, at least among birders.

Almost as bad as missing an endemic is having to put up with your birding friends' questions afterwards:

"Did you see the Sandstone Rock Thrush?"
"No."
"Stunning bird! Really something. Long, sleek, and lots of personality, a typical shrike thrush but bigger, and found nowhere else except the escarpments of ..."
"Yeah, I get it. Or rather I didn't get it. It was awfully hot that morning."
"You mean you looked for only one morning? Oh, you need more time than that. We walked for five days before we found one. Did I ever tell you the story?"
"Yes, you've told me the story. Let's get some lunch,  shall we?"
"OK. But what about the Chestnut-quilled Rock Pigeon? Did you find it? We had to work REALLY hard for for the pigeon...."


We had better luck on our way out of Kakadu when we climbed a dry forested hill to Mirral Lookout, viewing the escarpment to the east. Here, quite by chance, we stumbled into small parties of a lifer, the Banded Honeyeater.

Banded Honeyeater at blossom. 

Our destination, the little outback town of Pine Creek, NT, lay to the northeast. I will describe our stay in PIne Creek in my next post.