(photos: Alice Springs Desert Park, Rainbow Bee-eater, Poached Egg Daisy)
The three of us met at 6:45 and walked around the neighborhood and down to the dry riverbed that runs through town and were greeted by a large flock of cockatiels, beautiful gray and yellow parrots with round pink cheek patches. When we returned to the B & B, Anne had set the table in the garden with fruit, coffee, and croissants and served us an asparagus frittata. The five of us had a great breakfast together, and Wil offered to go birding with us again in the morning. So in a short while we set off for the great Alice Springs Sewage Ponds and with Wil’s key was able to enter the gate! A great first destination for Hil’s vacation! Fortunately she was very good humored about it and we saw quite a few birds as sewage ponds really attract them.
We dropped Wil off at home and drove west out of town to the Alice Springs Desert Park, grabbed a bit to eat in their café and set off on the trail through the park with headsets and commentary explaining the unique ecological features of the Red Centre. We saw beautiful displays of wildflowers and lots of birds in aviaries. We even saw the long-sought Bush Stone Curlew as he hissed at one that was inside an aviary. (You can’t put a caged bird on your life list, but a wild one attracted in by food, caged birds, etc, is OK).. We completed the tour with a bird show in which a ranger talked about various raptors as one by one they flew out, swooped around and caught bits of homburg on the fly and returned behind a rock wall. The last bird to fly out was a Black-breasted Buzzard who was supposed to crack open and eat an Emu egg, but he just took off and flew away to the embarrassment of the ranger!
We returned to Nthaba and Wil invited us up to the top of their garden for several glasses of wine and then we all went out to a great dinner at QC of more roasted scallops, chicken and steak.
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