Tassie X - the road home

Departure day - departure ferry embarkation 4.30pm. So no rush. Good, the Hellyar Rd distillery to visit and we decided to visit the Emu Valley Rhododenron Gardens as well (not just platypus there!).

More evidence supporting spring had sprung - a theme we had seen demonstrated many times along the journey. Here is a small family of Australian wooducks including a closeup of two ducklings demonstrating their learning to be on lookout and grazing.

In the main pond, aptly named Grebe Pond, was this Australasian grebe gliding unusually close to shore with some reed cover allowing interesting framing. Very cute, and cool to be able to get relatively close. Our final Tasmanian birds for the trip.

Back on the mainland we headed north via teh Hume Highway until Benalla (see next post) and then made our way to the Newell Highway until cutting across to Glen Innes from Narrabri. Very different country to where we had been (long straight stretches nad wide open fields of wheat and other cereal crops). We enjoyed seeing emus, but some other surprises popped up along the way too.

We had a stop at the Coo-ee Heritage and Information Centre in Gilgandra. There was some sqwarking up a gum tree in the car park and these galahs were responsible - at least the young one was. You can almost see it trying to pretend it wasn't responsible in the photos 😉.

Another interesting and very pleasant section of our return drive was going across and through the Mount Kaputar National Park between Narrabri and Bingara. We stopped at the Sawn Rocks picnic area and short walk and found three new birds to me. An unexpected excitment on such a beautiful day.

A white-winged triller

The trill gave the location away.

A yellow-tufted honeyeater

Offering a nice view of the underparts

Dusky woodswallow

A caught insect visible with the right angle!

Yes, even more emus! Well, we saw two more individual emus - this one about 30km along the Grafton Rd from Glen Innes and later in the day one as we sped along the Moterway near Maclean in a young growth sugar cane field. The Glen Innes one below was very responsive to Deb's whistles from the car window, so obligingly wandered over near the fence offering us a better view. Note the light weight of the feathers fluffed up in the first photo (by a not very strong breeze).