It was the first week of the holidays. My parents did their semi regular trip to Apollo Bay, and I thought I’d try to knock out a couple of parts of the great ocean walk. I was lucky enough to do this on two of the days – you can read about those adventures here.
Shelly Beach to Marengo
The first part of the walk was from Shelly Beach to Marengo, accompanied by the little dude. There was a lot of rock scrambling and sitting to watch the waves, so the emphasis wasn’t on birding like I would have liked.
Still, I reckon we managed to do pretty well.
We saw this hooded plover family about halfway back. It was pretty exciting to see. We also saw a number of plovers converging at Barham Beach. It’s so comforting to know that the young here have a much better chance then those around Geelong.
Decent numbers of sooty oystercatchers! Annoyingly, some people have even seen a beach stone curlew recently along this stretch of coast. The area is taunting me!
We were also fortunate enough to see the striated fieldwren above. 🙂 A lifer for the little dude.
The walk was actually fantastic. I wouldn’t mind exploring the area properly and going beyond what we originally saw.
Blanket Bay – Cape Otway
I have no idea what the above bird is. I spent about an hour at Blanket Bay just trying to find the olive whistler, before giving up. Fortunately, others on the Vicbirders group couldn’t ID it either. While that sucks, it means I’m not a moron. Huzzah!
Beautiful golden whistlers.
This guy is apparently just a young common garden skink. Huh!
OLIVE WHISTLER!
I was sitting down on the side of a steep bit, trying to catch my breath. I saw this little guy and swore in my head. It was phenomenal and I wasn’t even trying. I’d spent a lot of time on previous trips trying to find this guy and here it was, just sitting out in the open. Thank you, birdy!
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The birding was a tad substandard on these parts of the walk, but that was mostly because I was multi tasking to try. The first time I was watching a 7 year old and we were focusing on EVERYTHING. The second time I got so caught up in macro photography that I had to rush to catch the shuttle back.
I have read that the birds get even better along the other parts of the walk. It sounds like that if my goal is birding, I should just stay in the ONE area for a couple of hours rather then doing lots of little areas. It is a brilliant place to learn.