My Nature Blog
If you walk 600 metres along the Yambuk beach, you will come to the estuary. This is the end of the Lake Yambuk; a wetland system fed by the Shaw and Eumeralla Rivers.
The area was very scenic. It is an area that warrants a much longer visit. I didn’t spend too long here, as I’d already spent too long walking along the beach.
After Port Fairy, we arrived in Yambuk. We had one mission: find the giant slide. It ended up being a huge hit with Seth.
I saw a sign nearby saying that it was around 600 metres to the river mouth. I figured that I would be able to do a quick walk along the beach while Seth was on the slide and then return along the river.
I was mistaken.
Walking along this section of the beach was more difficult then I thought. The tide was rising, so I had to walk through the area of soft sand. There were times where I tried to walk in the hard sand along the tide line but had a couple of near misses with the waves.
My very unfit self struggled during the beach walk. I was very much aware of the time so didn’t do any beachcoming.
Despite my struggles, the walk was very beautiful. It is a place I’d love to return to and explore properly.
We were that impressed with Killarney Beach that we decided to check out other nearby beaches. The next one we visited was South Beach.
Seth fell in love with this beach and for good reason. We didn’t have much luck with rockpooling; we got there two hours after low tide and rock hopping was quite tricky. I was careful and still fell over twice.
It was still a beautiful location. It was great for photography. It didn’t have as much washed up seaweed as other areas.
Alas, we didn’t get to explore any other beaches along this stretch of coast. We wanted to get to Port Fairy around lunch time. I made a mental note to explore this stretch properly on my next visit.
[Read more…] about Visiting South Beach Along Belfast Coastal Reserve
It was our final day in the Warnnambool region. We had decided to go to Port Fairy, visiting Tower Hill on the way and exploring coastal reserves on the way bay.
Dad had missed the turn off to Tower Hill, and we had decided to continue to Port Fairy. I suggested we check out Killarney Beach. It had been recommended to me by birdwatching friends and was mentioned in Wildlife of the Otways and Shipwreck Coast. A previous visit had been underwhelming, but a quick look at Google Maps showed that it may have rockpools.
I knew I was taking a chance by suggesting it, but figured it was worth a shot. It ended up being one of my families favourite locations for the trip.
Killarney beach was a bit of a shock. It’s an area that is raved about and is meant to be brilliant for shorebirds, especially ones like ruddy turnstones.
It is actually a brilliant place. The image below shows some of the birds you can get at the beach. The issue is that a lot of the birds don’t hang out on the beach itself. They hang out on the rocks, offshore. And, unfortunately, my zoom lens wasn’t really good enough to see them. For that, we needed a scope.
Fortunately, two members of our party had scopes and they were able to point out various birds to us, including my first ruddy turnstone! I was so excited to see that, I did a little dance. I think turnstones are beautiful and would love to observe them more often.
The below two photos more of what the beach looks like. It is sparse, until you see the rocks further out.
We walked further up and came across sand with a decent amount of seaweed. Jack commented that this looked like ideal habitat for hooded plovers… and he was right. I never knew that before.
We were lucky and saw two in that little patch of the beach. Later, we saw 2-3 more. I couldn’t get the details of their legbands. It was so encouraging to see this, as some people can be quite rude about making way for the birds on ‘their’ beach.
Apparently you can tell the below is a kelp gull because of the white rump.
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I quite like Killarny. I would love to learn more about Warrnambool in general. So many amazing things to see and so little time. Whatever will I do? 😉