2006/08 Australia trip - Shark Bay |
|||
Monday July 31st
Monkey Mia’s big attraction is the feeding of the dolphins. Forty years ago a lady started feeding the dolphins there and found that they came back every day to be fed. Word got around and people came to see the dolphins and soon there was enough business to keep a campground going. Then the campground owners started supplying the campers with fish to feed to the dolphins. Eventually, the organization (CALM) that runs Western Australia’s national parks took over responsibility for the dolphin feeding, giving themselves a really difficult job. How does an organization whose prime directive is “Don’t feed the animals” run a dolphin feeding operation? Shutting it down would kill a world-famous tourist attraction. What they do is just feed a few known dolphins and then only a small amount a few times a day, not enough to make them dependent on humans. It seems to work, as some of the dolphins that have never been fed still show up to interact with humans and watch the action.
They lost one of their “regulars” a few years ago. They found that it had been killed by a sting ray’s barb through the heart, the same way that Steve Irwin died recently. They sometimes add new dolphins to the feeding, but only if they have grown up and already learned how to feed themselves.
 |
Monkey Mia dolphins (23.41) |
 |
|---|
The dolphins were there just after dawn, two or three of them swimming in the shallows amongst a row of a 
hundred or so people, occasionally stopping to take a look up at an interesting human. When the ranger thought they’d interacted enough, some volunteers came down with buckets of fish. The crowd has to step back out of the water, and the other dolphins have learned that this is a signal and they then come in for the feeding. The volunteers select people from the crowd to hold a fish in the water for a dolphin. Once all the fish are gone the dolphins amble away and probably won’t come back for a couple of hours.
Another ranger had responsibility for feeding fish heads to the pelicans, just enough to keep them interested 
and stop them from causing havoc by bullying the dolphins or the humans into giving up their fish. They are very large birds, larger than a lot of the kids. The one in this picture collided with me a split second after I took this shot.
In the rest of the resort, emus are a real problem, lunging at anyone walking around with food. Just like our bears, when they become too much of a nuisance they have to be tranquillized and carried back to the wilderness.
|
 |
|---|
We saw the dolphins being fed a couple of times and then we were off for a wildlife cruise on the Shotover, once a racing 
catamaran but now just a beautiful boat doing a tourist run. Being a catamaran with two hulls, the centre of the boat is open, covered by a net, and we could walk around the whole boat with really good visibility.
We saw a few dolphins enjoying their mating season, including one they call a “sponge dolphin”. These dolphins have learned to cover their snouts with a sea sponge, so they can dig through the sand and stir up fish without hurting themselves. What we were mainly looking for though were dugongs, sea cows, the Australian relatives to Florida’s manatees. The dugongs feed on the sea grass out in Shark Bay. We spent a lot of time just gazing out over the sea looking for the animals. I felt like Jack Hawkins on the bridge looking for U-boats.
|
Monkey Mia Shotover cruise (7.07) |
 |
|---|
We did find a few dugongs, but all we saw were their backs as they surfaced to take a gulp of air, and then they were back to munching the sea grass on the bottom. The only picture I have is of a model dugong from the museum. Dugongs are not photogenic.
Unfortunately all the beautiful weather went away and we had rain and wind. The wind was nice as we could turn the engines off and sail, but we all got wet and cold. We had a soggy damp evening trying to dry off, and then very little sleep between the late night partiers and the early morning fishermen, one of the problems of having so many campers squeezed into a small area