My original plan was to visit the Zoological & Forest Park in Noumea, a zoo which houses a number of endemic New Caledonian species (including the kagu) and is also quite good for watching wild birds. However, it's closed on Mondays, and guess which day we were there lol.
I think I'm happy it was though, as I likely wouldn't have been able to do both snorkelling and visiting the forest park and, as much as I love zoos, I always value seeing animals in the wild more than in captivity. No chance for a wild kagu or giant gecko with the time we had unfortunately, otherwise they'd have been amongst my top targets! I'll certainly return to New Caledonia some time in the future to properly explore the islands and hopefully find a bunch of its more distinctive and exciting endemic species.
Just got back from that trip, it was pretty great for what it was! Cruising definitely isn't for me, too much time on a crowded seagoing hotel and too little exploring for my liking, but I'm happy to have the experience regardless and accomplished my unambitious wildlife watching goals for the trip. I didn't see much while in Vanuatu and thus the majority of my wildlife encounters took place in New Caledonia, both in the capital city of Noumea and the smaller island of Lifou.
Noumea was our first stop on the cruise, and was also the early highpoint of wildlife watching for the trip. New Caledonia is quite notable for its high abundance of sea snakes and sea kraits and so I was pretty keen to see my first marine snake on this trip, and had heard that Baie de Citrons (Lemon Bay) in the south of Noumea was practically swarming with turtle-headed sea snakes (with occasional sightings of olive-headed sea snakes and blue-lipped sea kraits). Naturally, that's where I beelined to upon arriving in the city. Snorkelling out into the deeper part of the bay, I had a pleasant surprise when my first marine reptile encounter turned out to be not with a snake, but my first ever wild sea turtle! I knew there was a possibility of seeing them here, but never expected it. Only about ten minutes after I managed to find a turtle-headed sea snake, which, given it seemed to be mostly unbothered by my presence, I followed for a good while as it searched for fish eggs (their exclusive diet) amongst the coral. My first sea turtle and first sea snake on the same dive, how good!
I only have an older, cheaper camera that I am able to take underwater shots with, so my reptile photography while snorkelling in Noumea was more subpar than usual. Thankfully, I got to see another three green sea turtles from the surface of the water just while on the jetty at Lifou! I had a quick snorkel here too to poke around the cliffs for sea kraits (either blue-lipped or New Caledonian), but unfortunately no luck this time.
Lifou was also the best stop for birding on the trip, and I saw the majority of the 14 lifer bird species there. The vegetation on Lifou is extremely dense in most places, which makes seeing most birds quite difficult (damn you large Lifou white-eye, teasing me with their calls while never revealing themselves), but with a bit of patience many small birds emerged from the understory to flutter about in open clearings. Below are three typical Melanesian species - the long-tailed triller, cardinal myzomela and dark-brown honeyeater, as well as the striated starling, which is endemic to New Caledonia.
On our slow journey back to Australia, our ship was often accompanied by red-footed boobies, which gave some spectacular views as they soared through the air right at eye level before diving into the sea after shoals of fish.
Birds:
1. Wedge-tailed Shearwater
2. Great Crested Tern
3. Indian Mynah
4. House Sparrow
5. Silver Gull
6. Dark-brown Honeyeater
7. Satin Swiftlet
8. Rock Dove
9. Red-vented Bulbul
10. Spotted Dove
11. Common Waxbill
12. Coconut Lorikeet
13. Silvereye
14. Small Lifou White-eye
15. Cardinal Myzomela
16. Long-tailed Triller
17. South Melanesian C*ckooshrike (cmon frontier)
18. Striated Starling
19. Sacred Kingfisher
20. White-bellied Woodswallow
21. Melanesian Flycatcher
22. Pacific Swallow
23. Red-footed Booby
After docking in Brisbane, back in Australia, I had quite a bit of time on my hands before my flight back home that evening, and so I went exploring a bit. As expected, eastern water dragons were everywhere, with tame individuals like this big fella providing particularly good photo opportunities.
I spent a lot of my time in Brisbane at the Queensland Museum, mostly nerding out over at the new Dinosaurs Unearthed gallery. However, I also stumbled across these familiar characters whilst in the Discovery Centre - from what I can recall, this is my first time seeing giant burrowing cockroaches in real life! Another species ticked off the PZ list (and also the only one from Australia I hadn't seen yet).
Sounds like a lovely trip! Sea turtles, sea snakes and red footed boobys! Nice! I hope to see sea turtles and red footed boobys too on my upcoming trip to the Galapagos Islands
The vegetation on Lifou is extremely dense in most places, which makes seeing most birds quite difficult (damn you large Lifou white-eye, teasing me with their calls while never revealing themselves)
Scratch that, I was looking more closely through my pictures from the trip and it turns out I did manage to see and photograph a large Lifou white-eye, which means I saw both of Lifou's endemic bird species! The perks of photographing every white-eye I could lol, they were everywhere on the island but the widespread silvereye and also endemic small Lifou white-eye were both far more common than the large species (which lacks the white eye rings the group is named after).
Hola! Buenas Dias!
I'm back from my most recent trip to Ecuador and mainly the Galapagos islands! And it was lovely! Sadly, we didn't get to Genovesa, so I didn't see the red footed booby's.
Still it was an awesome trip!
On Baltra, the airport, we we're basically immediately greeted with a big, Galapagos land iguana!
It didn't take long and in the next morning we saw a group of Spinner dolphins in the distance. As well as finding Green sea turtles, basically everywhere!
A small green sea turtle in a small lagoon!
In the mangrove forests, we could often find the Lava heron, a very small heron, endemic to Galapagos!
On the many Islands, it's not really hard to find Marine Iguana's, but we did get a very special photo, thanks to this small Lava lizard
We also saw the well known, Flightless cormorant
And we off course saw the very small, Galapagos penguin!
And what is the Galapagos without the famous, Blue footed booby!
We did see the larger cousin of the blue footed booby, the Nazca booby
I'm happy to announce that I got a new traveling location in mind! I plan on going to a unique place/Island in the world with unique fauna, you could say just as unique as the Galapagos. I'm going to the land of chameleons and lemurs, or better known as;
Time for that thing I do where I update this thread after being away from the forum during the inter-DLC period.
I've had a busy year so far in regards to trips out of Adelaide, a lot of them to do with uni. In February I was on Kangaroo Island for five days, and it was pretty cool seeing how much the island had recovered since my last visit in 2021 - it had been one of the worst affected places by the 2019-2020 Black Summer bushfires, but life on KI is slowly but surely recovering. Below are four mammals seen on the trip: the Kangaroo Island kangaroo (a distinctive endemic subspecies of the western grey kangaroo), tammar wallaby, koala and Australian sea lion.
Much more recently, earlier this month, I spent 9 days in New South Wales (more specifically the Wellington Caves) on a palaeontology field trip. I didn't get much of a chance to do a ton of wildlife-watching on that trip, unless you count fossils as wildlife (in which case I saw heaps of cool stuff, from marsupial lions to recently extinct rodents), but the highlight was on the one overnight stop we had whilst travelling over there. It was bucketing down with rain, resulting in frogs popping up all over the campground - this included hordes of the ever-common spotted marsh frogs, but also a good number of spectacular giant banjo frogs, such as the one pictured below. These were a new species for me and they're bigger and prettier than the eastern banjo frogs we get around here.
(in case you were wondering why they're called banjo frogs, see here)
The highlight of this year so far was not a trip done with uni, but with a field naturalist society instead. I participated in a small vertebrate trapping survey on the Eyre Peninsula over the Easter long weekend, and we caught all kinds of awesome reptiles and small mammals. Far and away the stars of the show however were the thorny devils - I had never seen them in the wild before, and they're such incredibly charming animals! There were 7 found on the trip overall, 5 of which I got to see myself.
For mammals there were four species caught, two marsupials and two native rodents - the southern ningaui, western pygmy possum, Bolam's mouse and Mitchell's hopping-mouse:
I saw a total of 17 reptile species over the survey weekend, including 5 skinks, 6 geckos and 4 agamids, but the most exciting aside from the thorny devils were the two snakes, a hatchling king brown/mulga snake (a "prince brown" if you will) and my very first wild common death adder! With this highly elusive species I've now seen every Australian reptile in PZ in the wild.
Definitely not chill with people, this is what they did the first chance they got:
My camera does have a pretty good zoom (have a 50-250 mm lens) but the main reason I got good close ups was just because they were captured in pitfall and Elliot traps and I took pictures either while they were within a tub (like with the two mice) or just as they were being released.
EDIT: Forgot you may also mean the Kangaroo Island pictures, yes the mammals are that chill there lol. They've had very few predators for thousands of years, and they're used to tourists. Here's a gang of wallabies raiding our campsite as an example:
Time for that thing I do where I update this thread after being away from the forum during the inter-DLC period.
I've had a busy year so far in regards to trips out of Adelaide, a lot of them to do with uni. In February I was on Kangaroo Island for five days, and it was pretty cool seeing how much the island had recovered since my last visit in 2021 - it had been one of the worst affected places by the 2019-2020 Black Summer bushfires, but life on KI is slowly but surely recovering. Below are four mammals seen on the trip: the Kangaroo Island kangaroo (a distinctive endemic subspecies of the western grey kangaroo), tammar wallaby, koala and Australian sea lion.
Much more recently, earlier this month, I spent 9 days in New South Wales (more specifically the Wellington Caves) on a palaeontology field trip. I didn't get much of a chance to do a ton of wildlife-watching on that trip, unless you count fossils as wildlife (in which case I saw heaps of cool stuff, from marsupial lions to recently extinct rodents), but the highlight was on the one overnight stop we had whilst travelling over there. It was bucketing down with rain, resulting in frogs popping up all over the campground - this included hordes of the ever-common spotted marsh frogs, but also a good number of spectacular giant banjo frogs, such as the one pictured below. These were a new species for me and they're bigger and prettier than the eastern banjo frogs we get around here.
(in case you were wondering why they're called banjo frogs, see here)
The highlight of this year so far was not a trip done with uni, but with a field naturalist society instead. I participated in a small vertebrate trapping survey on the Eyre Peninsula over the Easter long weekend, and we caught all kinds of awesome reptiles and small mammals. Far and away the stars of the show however were the thorny devils - I had never seen them in the wild before, and they're such incredibly charming animals! There were 7 found on the trip overall, 5 of which I got to see myself.
For mammals there were four species caught, two marsupials and two native rodents - the southern ningaui, western pygmy possum, Bolam's mouse and Mitchell's hopping-mouse:
I saw a total of 17 reptile species over the survey weekend, including 5 skinks, 6 geckos and 4 agamids, but the most exciting aside from the thorny devils were the two snakes, a hatchling king brown/mulga snake (a "prince brown" if you will) and my very first wild common death adder! With this highly elusive species I've now seen every Australian reptile in PZ in the wild.
Time for that thing I do where I update this thread after being away from the forum during the inter-DLC period.
I've had a busy year so far in regards to trips out of Adelaide, a lot of them to do with uni. In February I was on Kangaroo Island for five days, and it was pretty cool seeing how much the island had recovered since my last visit in 2021 - it had been one of the worst affected places by the 2019-2020 Black Summer bushfires, but life on KI is slowly but surely recovering. Below are four mammals seen on the trip: the Kangaroo Island kangaroo (a distinctive endemic subspecies of the western grey kangaroo), tammar wallaby, koala and Australian sea lion.
Much more recently, earlier this month, I spent 9 days in New South Wales (more specifically the Wellington Caves) on a palaeontology field trip. I didn't get much of a chance to do a ton of wildlife-watching on that trip, unless you count fossils as wildlife (in which case I saw heaps of cool stuff, from marsupial lions to recently extinct rodents), but the highlight was on the one overnight stop we had whilst travelling over there. It was bucketing down with rain, resulting in frogs popping up all over the campground - this included hordes of the ever-common spotted marsh frogs, but also a good number of spectacular giant banjo frogs, such as the one pictured below. These were a new species for me and they're bigger and prettier than the eastern banjo frogs we get around here.
(in case you were wondering why they're called banjo frogs, see here)
The highlight of this year so far was not a trip done with uni, but with a field naturalist society instead. I participated in a small vertebrate trapping survey on the Eyre Peninsula over the Easter long weekend, and we caught all kinds of awesome reptiles and small mammals. Far and away the stars of the show however were the thorny devils - I had never seen them in the wild before, and they're such incredibly charming animals! There were 7 found on the trip overall, 5 of which I got to see myself.
For mammals there were four species caught, two marsupials and two native rodents - the southern ningaui, western pygmy possum, Bolam's mouse and Mitchell's hopping-mouse:
I saw a total of 17 reptile species over the survey weekend, including 5 skinks, 6 geckos and 4 agamids, but the most exciting aside from the thorny devils were the two snakes, a hatchling king brown/mulga snake (a "prince brown" if you will) and my very first wild common death adder! With this highly elusive species I've now seen every Australian reptile in PZ in the wild.
Sea turtles, sea snakes and red footed boobys! Nice! I hope to see sea turtles and red footed boobys too on my upcoming trip to the Galapagos Islands 
Those thorny devils, how amazing!
