Travels with a Tick Magnet: When too many waterbirds are never enough!

I finished yesterday's post with a comment about workers painting the kerbs late last night. The cold hard light of day revealed that they weren't painting the kerbs, but the directional arrows in the middle of the road.

We set off to do our dog walk aiming to visit the Old Gum Tree. En route we noticed this rather charming old-style house.

The fenced park in which the Old Gum Tree is located is the venue for a bunch of people to let their dogs off the lead. Several of them came over to check out the new chum (who was kept on the lead as she could escape from the park if given an incentive). This person is Mitch.

Here is the tree: now referred to as the Old Concrete Tree as it has been cased in concrete for many years (it died in 1906)!

This is its significance,

As we proceeded on I noticed this car. Don't bother going the through the traditional process to make one, rent it instead!

Unless of course you find the traditional process entertaining!

We found a few interesting birds and a bunch more amusing dogs on the walk, with the route depicted here.

Our main outing today was to St Kilda, part of the Adelaide International Bird Sanctuary National Park. Despite the "National Park" designation dogs on leads are allowed. Brilliant: may this thinking extend to less enlightened jurisdictions - NSW and Victoria I'm looking at you! It is nothing to do with the suburb in Melbourne nor the football team. No caps were found today.

The route basically retraced the last hour of our drive into Adelaide so Frances got a few pix of the works on the Expressway.

Once at St Kilda we were initially disappointed at the bird life in the salt lagoons. There were many gulls including this lot on some encrusted foam but not much else.

Then we got to look at the sea water, To say there were heaps of birds would be a large understatement. We estimated 1000 Black Swans, 500 each of Pacific Black Ducks and Grey Teal.

This flock of Royal Spoonbills contained 67 birds.

I estimated that overall there were 200 Pied Stilt and 60 Banded Stilts.

Here are some Banded Stilts ..

.. with, in the bottom of the image, a Curlew Sandpiper.

Our total bird list for this site is here.

We wandered of to the North end of the village and enjoyed seeing a few Red-kneed Dotterel and (Bird of the Day perhaps?) 6 Australian Spotted Crakes. Although the crakes kept going back into the scrub I was confident I saw two groups of 3 birds of this species. We couldn't go as far into the scrub as I would have liked as it ran into the private salt fields.

Next stop was the Mangrove walk which ended - after about 600m of boardwalk - ata lookout over the Inlet. Here are some Royal Spoonbills, with some mangrove leaves in the foreground.

A couple of snaps of aspects of the mangroves.

When Frances was getting the pass for the mangroves she picked up a leaflet for the whole Sanctuary area, put out by Birdlife SA. They reckoned the best area was Thompson Beach , about 50km North of St Kilda. We decided to invest the time and diesel and pointed the Pajero in that direction. The map was pretty crappy as the road they showed coming off the highway did not in fact reach the highway. Fortunately the Sanctuary was shown on notices on the highway and we found our way.

We started by following one of their trails though the bush with fruiting Sea Box (Alyxia buxifolia) ...