2019/11 Australia trip - Kallista & Cardinia |
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Friday November 29th
John and Edna took Sandie to a quilt shop in Boronia in the morning. We’d hoped to meet up with their son and family in the afternoon, but he was off in Queensland for a boys’ weekend, and the girls were busy too.
Sandie wanted to see some more parrots so I suggested Kallista and Sherwood Forest, where there’s a tradition of tourists feeding the parrots. We found plenty of cockatoos but just a few parrots, crimson rosellas.
We walked partway along the Lyrebird Trail through the forest of towering mountain ash and a dense understory of ferns. We heard more birds than we saw.
We retreated when the rain came.
We stopped at Lysterfield Lake where we found purple swamp hens and corellas and guinea fowl.
Then we moved on to Cardinia, site of one of Melbourne’s reservoirs but also home to mobs of kangaroos. 
We didn’t see as many as on our last visit but those we did see were very active, bounding around us.
A bonus though was finding this browsing wombat, our only one of the trip. Wombats are largely nocturnal and live in burrows so they are hard to see. They are like pigs with an armoured skeleton and they are easy to hit while 
driving at night, often fatal to both the wombat and the car.
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Cardinia (5.03) |
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The rain intensified by evening and John heroically cooked us a barbecue while we stayed dry indoors.