Azure Kingfisher
It started raining sometime about eleven pm last night, and continued for much of the night, just a light drizzling rain that had mostly stopped by the time we ate breakfast. With the clouds breaking we decided that we would go on the cruise of the Arthur River, so drove across the one lane bridge to the store where we registered.
Since that was just before nine, and the cruise didn’t leave until 10:15 we continued on the road for about another kilometre to “the edge of the world” viewpoint. It was still somewhat misty over the ocean but we walked along the ocean and took some photographs and video. There was an old wombat there when we returned from our walk. Enid tried to walk in front of it to drive it towards my video camera, but it just totally ignored her and walked on by toward the edge of the parking lot.
The tour was a very pleasant way to spend the day. It was a beautiful temperature, mostly sunny, and not much wind. The area along the river is temperate rainforest. The trees range from very talk eucalyptus (blackwood) to tiny shrubs, and two different kinds of tree ferns. We saw a number of different kinds of birds, including white bellied sea eagles, cormorants, a few ducks, and a very pretty azure kingfisher. This is a very rare bird in Tasmania (according to my bird book).
The sea eagles had a young fledgling with them. It didn’t fly too much. The boat captain threw fish into the water, but on the way upriver the eagles ignored it. He obviously has them trained to respond for he would blow two short blasts on the boat horn, but the birds didn’t move. He suggested that they are trying to train the young one to catch its own food. However, on the return trip he did the same thing, and this time an adult eagle came down, took the fish out of the water, and then flew back up into the tree with the juvenile bird. The captain repeated the process with more fish, and the eagles did it again so we got to see them take a fish from the surface of the water.
Lunch was served on shore. There are several tame pademelons there that hopped around as we ate. Then we were given books with numbered photos of the kinds of plants, and we walked about 500 metres or so along a trail into the bush. There were at least five different kinds of ferns along the trail. One of the more interesting things for me were the burrows (really small mud piles) of a kind of crayfish. The youngest couple on the cruise (the rest of us were all old retired fogies, or nearly so) were walking just ahead of us and he suddenly yelled out an expletive. He had nearly stepped on a black tiger snake. It swam away very quickly across the tiny little stream with its head out of the water.
We ate so much for lunch today, and so late, that we didn’t feel like making much for supper. Instead we just had a salad, a hot cross bun, and some cheese.