Killarny 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? 😉