Lamington National Park - The Final Days of A Great Holiday

I have raved about the benefits of having a terrace literally reaching into the rain forest, as you can see in the photo above I am not far from the truth, our O'Reilly's accommodation was indeed pretty well placed for someone that likes their trees.


We kept going to the early morning O'Reilly's Bird Tour and we kept being stunned by the trust those small feathered guys showed the bird guides. One of the days we had more of a walk around in the area and managed to spot another (slimmer) Thrush, another Green Catbird and 6 Topknot Pigeon in flight - the Topknots were new to me. :-)

We also kept pushing those tired legs ours, all in all we probably covered 50km over the long weekend, with the brunt of the distance covered over two good long full day hikes into the forest, 22 and 18km.

Those long walks are truly rewarding! If you are there purely for the birds you are probably better off staying close around O'Reilly's, where you can see nearly all the birds of Lamington except maybe for the Rufous Scrub-bird, but for everything else - including the exercise - you do really well by exploring further into the wild. The tiny Praying Mantis in the photo above was so well camouflaged that I nearly deleted the photo first time I went through the set.


Logrunners are great birds, they just scramble around in the very darkest part of the forest floor, often close to (but not on) the path. Therefore they become a quite easy tick, but it is very difficult getting good photos - some artificial lighting increases your success rate significantly though.

The final tick of the weekend was added after the sighting of a Noisy Pitta! I have been after that one for a while, up at Kingfisher Park in far north Queensland we used nearly 45 minutes stalking one calling from the bush, but we never got eyesight of the little colorful gem. This time in Lamington, the loud call once again alerted us and half of our little group managed to see the noise-maker before it took off. Seeing pictures of Pittas in a bird book gives you the impression that they are nearly unnaturally colorful and will be easy picking for any predators, but when they are hiding in the deep darkness of their rain forest habitat they still manages to blend in pretty well.


All good! - This will be the last Lamington post for this time :-) What a great spot - I will definitely try to go there again another time, and having proven (to myself) that it is in range of the Magna, one could even anticipate it happening more frequently in the future :-)

Lamington National Park - Road Trip Into Queensland

We got an offer that we simply could not reject - a long weekend in Lamington National Park at O'Reilly's; good food, fantastic walks, great birds and exceptional company - yes, I really like my tent, the cous-cous camping dinners and even the solitude, but once and a while it is nice to be spoiled and "yes" cous-cous is great for camping, but to be honest my admiration of this tight packing carbohydrate is not so much due to its gourmet qualities - I would survive a weekend without! ;-)

Lamington National Park is located just north of the Queensland-New South Wales border. Knowing that we would have the luxury of running water et al. all of the weekend, it seemed appropriate to rough it a bit getting there - Driving the Magna is obviously always a joy, but 12 hours seems to be the point where even a good thing becomes slightly tiresome. To optimize our time up north, we left Sydney Wednesday afternoon straight after work and by bringing the tent and a bit of gear, we managing to bite the trip into two. There is a good selection of campsites close to the highway, so we pushed on until around 9pm, used about 30 min to get to a campsite and managed to clock up a healthy 8 hours of sleep before we hit the road again.

After all that driving I cannot help getting a bit jittery, luckily check-in at O'Reilly's went pretty smoothly and my companion agreed upon a quick 30 min dash into the rain forest. It was great using the legs a bit after the long drive and it did not take long before we had seen Yellow-throated Scrubwren and zoomed in on a little Logrunner family doing some excavation on the forest floor. Luckily I had brought the charger for the camera this time, because those rain forest are indeed very dark and can take a lot of flash. It was getting proper dark and we retreated to what should prove to be one of the best wildlife spotting locations of the weekend - the terrace of our rented apartment.


Pademelons in the field down below - at least until the arrival of a hungry looking dingo - bird darting around in the rain forest trees, that had conveniently been places centimeters away from the boundary of the terrace. As night fell the rest of our weekend companions arrived, just in time to see the influx of the nightly creatures of the forest - lured in by the light, an army of the most fantastic insects arrived and I was very happy, that I had brought the macro lens. The weekend had hardly started and it was already looking exceptionally exciting :-)