Gundabooka National Park - Mulgowan Aboriginal Site - Road trip with Danish visitors - Part 4

Back at Dry Tank campground after an eventful day, it was pretty clear that we were all up for a less stressful afternoon. Outback summer hiking is pretty demanding and we all had that good honest feeling of having had a bit of a workout. After spending a few hours leaned back in a camping chair only managing to get a photo of a curious Common Bronzewing and discussing the fine art of managing your water ration while hiking - should you drink it all in the beginning to save weight up the hill or is there a hint of sense in keeping a few milliliters for the last three hours of the walk? - Both tactics had been tested that morning with various success! :-) Finally, we were ready to explore a little again and took the car to Mulgowan Aboriginal Site, close to the entrance of Gundabooka national park. Water is life in the outback and if there is water there will be signs of life. Mulgowan is such a site, walking along the path you only slowly realize that you are brought into a very shallow gorge. Water has over time carved a strip through the rock and left a little oasis, where plants, animals and humans have been able to find shadow, shelter and reliable drinking water. It is in no way an impressive majestic gorge, but considering the dry sandy landscape surrounding it, you understand the importance of the place. The caves bordering the gorge display a good selection of Aboriginal rock art and we saw significantly more wildlife surrounding the site, than we had seen hiking across the dry plains during the scorching midday sun .. those kangaroos seems to understand water ration managing and Australian weather much better than a gang of Danish tourists! Bird life was not as good as I had hoped for. The most likely reason is that a wetter Australia allow the birds a much wider selection of places to drink, therefore they are not forced to all journey to those secure waterholes that so many birders take advantage of at sunrise and sunset in the dry outback. Abundance of water allows life to flourish and spread, but strangely enough it also makes it harder to see those hard to find species at their usual secure habitats. After a good solid day we could all sleep. Early next morning I took the macro lens for a little trip to the bush toilet. The humidity generated in those bush dunnys attracts an excellent selection of exciting creatures, and this morning was not different. Highlight was the close-up of the Mantis above. After a few days of outback loveliness the part of our little party that had the joy of sharing a tent were quite adamant that any change of a close encounter with some water and a bathroom without Mantises would be appreciated. Having seen some red dust it was time to see what else NSW had to offer and I decided, that Warrumbungle National Park was just the right place to setup camp for the remaining part of our journey.

Gundabooka National Park - Road Trip with Danish Visitors - Part 3

Summit day! Not too bad using a day off climbing an outback mountain. I had done it before and I can promise that I would love to do it again. After a great nights sleep we got up, had some porridge, filled the water bottles and the fresh-of-the-plane Danes had to use some time getting their virgin skin covered in a protective layer of sunscreen. While all that rubbing was going on, I gave a little 101 on how to walk in the bush, what species of animals we were likely to encounter and that we would not see. I used quite a bit of energy explaining that we would not(!) encounter snakes and therefore we very perfectly safe walking through high grass and scrubby bush. I think, I even managed to state that seeing a snake under these conditions would be as lucky as winner the big one in Lotto .. after approximately 100 meters of walking the little fella below tried to cross the path in front of us. According to my previous statement it could obviously not be a snake - that would be too lucky - so I mentioned that there was a good chance of it being a legless lizard ... having had a bit of time looking at photos and a visit to the the website for the Atlas of NSW Wildlife, I must admit that Gundabooka is inhabited by two types of snakes with black heads, the Monk Snake and the Mallee Black-headed snake, my best guess is that our little friend is a juvenile of the latter. Crossing the scrubby flats is warm and tedious work, but the reward is well worth it, as soon as the landscape start rising the bushes and trees disappear and you start climbing Mount Gundabooka. There is no well defined path to follow and if you get to eager and try to gain high too fast, you are likely to be find yourself stuck in a dead end having to backtrack, but as long as you take it easy and just follow the flow of the landscape it is an easy climb. Taking your time on the way up gives you the possibility of observing how plants, insects and animals change as you leave the grassland below and get some rock under food. The views change as well! What a lovely way to spend time with some good friends! Sitting on a big rock in the middle of nothing, with wood swallows circling around you, skinks curiously peaking out from their small caves and a wedge-tailed eagle hovering high above trying to spot dinner or just out stretching its wings. The raw landscape of Gundabooka national park and the views from the mountain makes it one of my absolute favorite national parks in Australia. If you live in Sydney and have visitors flying in, that are willing to (and capable of) doing a good hike/climb, I think Gundabooka is their best chance of getting a feel of what the Australian outback is about .. unless you splash out and fly.

Gundabooka National Park - Road Trip with Danish Visitors - Part 2

Next stop was Gundabooka National Park, one of my absolute favorite national parks in NSW. Back in 2009 I visited a very dry Gundabooka with the Amoores and was immensely impressed; 1,2,3,4. In 2010 I had planned to visit again during my drive north to Bowra station, but Gundabooka was flooded by torrential rain and I could not enter! This time around I had heard that the Bourke region had had a fair amount of rain and I was looking forward to see a much greener desert. Gundabooka is far enough inland to have the feel of proper outback and still it is reachable from Sydney within a good solid day of driving, or as we did, easily reached from Capertee Valley with some of the day to spare. The Australian outback did indeed given us a very rare display of lush green colors and a feel of life that I have never seen as strong before. Despite of us doing our journey midday we managed to see lots of wildlife along the road, indeed it got a bit of stressful with hordes of goats being attracted to the green grass growing along the road and not showing great respect to the traffic rules. I ended up sitting with a food ready on the break and no time to see what type of woodswallows it was darting around up above the treetops. Soon after leaving the bitumen we got ourselves the first great nature sighting - A Varanus Gouldii walked across the road in front of us, with as little respect for traffic laws as the goats had displayed. What a great spot! Great to show my Danish companions a good size proper reptile and good for me to see a monitor that was not a Varanus Various. Red dust all over, some scrubby mulga and mulga ants - Dry Tank camping ground always delivers :-) I had been very careful in keeping this trip pretty luxurious, I had even chosen a campsite sporting a bush toilet, since I was not aware of how accustomed my companions were to camping life. Clearly my efforts were recognized and appreciated ... The cheers would hardly stop after we realized how exceptional good an insect (and insect eating creatures) selection there was to find in the little shed, one of us was so concerned about the well being of the inhabitants that he straight away proclaimed that he would rather die than use the little room ... what a noble way of trying to avoid stressing those small insects! :-) - I am sure the Gehyra variegata Tree Dtella below appreciated the privacy.

Gundabooka - Part 4 - Final day

We could all easily have used another day or two in the national park, but even extended long weekends runs out. Before leaving the park entirely, we made a detour to the Mulgowan Aboriginal site between the Dry Tank camping ground, where we had resided, and the highway.

As always, it pays off to take you time, do some stops and detours and make the travel a part of the holiday ... hope that makes sense? On the way towards the park we had been very focused on getting there as early as possible and had tried to avoid "unnecessary" time consuming breaks. Departing already Monday morning and not having to start work before Wednesday, we felt much more relaxed about "wasting" time ... and it was tempting to try to nail the last two types of woodswallows - We had seen many thousands on the drive out (how many non-identified do you have to see to claim you have seen them all?) but a picture or two would be nice to have.

Guess it gives sense; a good spot for an Aboriginal site would obviously include accessibility to water and where there is water there is life. The eastern end of the park felt much more alive than in the dryer mulga scrub where we had camped ... in the wisdom of hindsight "Dry Tank camping ground" does not give the impression of a sparking river running close by ;-)

A short walk took us into a shallow gorge where on wet days a little creek would run through. When we were there the creek had turned into a row of small puddles, but enough water to sustain quite a bit of life. Under some of the rocks there were a good display of some heavily guarded Aboriginal drawings.

Great spot, could have been fun staying around for a bit longer, but we had decided to push a bit further north towards Bourke and do another little stop at a small wildlife refuge next to Fort Bourke Stockade.

Once again it was quite evident that water means life in the outback! We stopped at a little picnic area next to the river and it was all happening around us! Absolute fantastic spot for woodswallows, but we also saw a few honeyeaters, White-browed Treecreepers, parrots, doves and more importantly a few Dusky Moorhens lacking the white tail, which meant they were indeed Black-tailed Native-hens instead :-)

All good! The hot weather sucks the energy out of you and after running around in the bush for 3 days it was actually very pleasant to enter the confined and air conditioned space of the Magna and point that long sparkling(?) bonnet towards Sydney.

Jarrod and Adelle had told us that The road between Bourke and Nyngan would be excellent for spotting reptiles and that was true indeed, we actually had a hard time trying to avoid running over various critters sitting sunning themselves on the tarmac. Apart from the reptiles the trip home also produced good views of some Blue-winged Parrots, not bad at all - one of the birds we missed last time when we did our Mungo plus Hattah-Kulkyne trip.

Great trip, as already mentioned I saw 10 new birds, trouble is that little G. probably tripled that :-( I will desperately need to go somewhere exciting soon to get an advantage before she catches up ... and so will others ;-)

Black-tailed Native-hen
Blue-winged Parrot
Red-backed Kingfisher
Varied Sittella
Striped Honeyeater
Crimson Chat
Chestnut-breasted Quail-thrush
Crested Bellbird
White-browed Woodswallow
Black-faced Woodswallow

After 4 posts dealing with our Gundabooka trip I understand that the readers might be a bit bored hearing about the outback. For those dedicated souls that wants even more red dust and blue sky I have included a link to my Picasa album below where a few extra pictures from the trip has been included.

Gundabooka

Gundabooka National Park - Part 3 - Wildlife in the Mulga

The faithful reader will remember already seeing some of the landscape highlights from our long weekend bushwalk to the Mount Gundabooka range, in addition to the photogenic vistas the selection of wildlife made the walk turn into something really special.

Walking for 8 hours passing through something like 4 different types of habitats will necessarily have to give you a good selection of wildlife and some decent photo opportunities ...

and it did, but looking through my pictures from the trip it seems that the wildlife of Gundabooka is slightly more suspicious and less tolerant to the approach of the camera equipped bushwalker. I have a much higher ratio of pictures that can only be used for ID purpose, but are nowhere near the quality needed for the blog :-)

From a birding point of view, the more open mulga forest as well as the grassy slopes below the mountain were absolutely fantastic areas to visit and we managed to see 6 species of birds that I have not encountered previously: Red-backed Kingfisher, Varied Sittella, Striped Honeyeater, Crimson Chat, Chestnut-breasted Quail-thrush and Crested Bellbird.

We saw very little life in the denser mulga ... it could obviously rely on the fact that we had our eyes fixed well and truly on the compasses :-D Climbing the mountain, we had excellent views of a variety of reptiles, more goats than I have seen in any national park before and the usual swallows and martins plus great display of a few Little Woodswallows.

The outback somehow always feels dry, but driving towards Gundabooka it had looked like there had been rain in the area not to long ago, that might be the reason for our luck with the wildlife(?)


As usual I have had terrible trouble with the ID of the various reptiles spotted. I had actually hoped Jarrod, who is fairly skilled in the business of turning over stuff lying on the ground and naming what crawls underneath, would have helped me out by sorting out the naming on his blog ... instead it seems he also focused on the much easier task of just taking the pictures :-)


The kingfisher above had us puzzled for a while, it never showed its back, but sporting a slightly racier haircut than the usual type, we knew we were onto something exciting. Also the treecreeper in the second picture is puzzling, it has to be the Brown type (only Brown and White-browed in Gundabooka) but it looks different from the Brown variety that I have seen before - any thoughts are welcome.

Great guns! Super walk, would love to go again if someone will sponsor a extra day off ;-)