Greetings from Hong Kong!
Well, it appears that the blog will be backlogged for a little bit as I catch up on photo editing, writing and working on some school stuff…but it’ll happen eventually. In this post, I’ll detail some of the wild animals I’ve found while exploring the wine country to the northeast of Adelaide, South Australia – pretty much entirely birds but also a few other iconic species (COUGHkangaroos). I’ll briefly talk about the wine of the Barossa Valley and surrounding areas (or what little of it I know) in a soon-to-come post, so for now it’s straight to the animals:
Birds
As I prefaced in my previous post on the marine fish of South Australia, the province does not have nearly the biodiversity of the tropical provinces (most notably Queensland), so the total number of observable bird species here is not tremendous (around 450-500 by most estimates, versus the almost 700 in Queensland). Of these, I have good quality pictures of more than 3 pixels’ resolution for about 5 species. With that being said, three things:
- I know next to nothing about birds and I didn’t go on a dedicated birding trip with any scopes or special cameras (my birding trip was a morning walk along a winery road, and my “special camera” was a point-and-shoot that’s probably worth like $10 and a side of fries now), so cut me some slack;
- Plus, these birds are super shy – like I literally reached into my pocket to get my camera and they just flew away. And I had like 30 meters of distance in front of me, so go figure; and
- At the very least, many of the pretty-colored birds one would normally associate solely with the tropics (species in the order of parrots, mostly) can still be found in South Australia, where the climate feels decidedly more Mediterranean. So thank goodness, the pictures aren’t just of sparrows or some other drab, objectively boring birds (hey, I’m not a birder, I want flashy colors and interesting stuff).
So here we go:
Probably the least shy and (go figure) the least interesting bird I saw on my walk was this bird – the common bronzewing, Phaps chalcoptera. I suppose I’m being a little unfair, though. As the common name implies, the males of these species have beautiful wings with a metallic, rainbow-colored sheen when seen in the right light. Alas, I did not see it in the right light – I was right below the bird where it perched on a branch, illuminated in perfectly the wrong way so that it looked just like a rather plain dove. These birds are quite common throughout Australia, being found in every state and most every habitat in the continent save the tropics of the north and the drier parts of the Outback.
True to my point number 3 above, South Australia is home to a wide variety of parrot species, most all of which are brightly-colored. At the winery were I stayed, there were lots of fruit trees and moderately disturbed habitat – perfect for attracting these birds, which they did in spades (I saw at least six or seven species, few of which I successfully photographed, of course). Problem is, these birds are as skittish as they are beautiful, and as I didn’t have a birding scope or even binoculars to attempt to macgyver some sort of manual magnification for my camera or phone, I was forced to approach closely to get any kind of resolution in my pictures…which very rarely went well. The fact that many parrots form hybrids and have very similar patterning which requires close examination to differentiate species also doesn’t help my identification process. But I did my best.
These two birds above, to my knowledge, are best placed in the genus Platycercus, the rosellas. This genus contains six species of moderately-sized parrots, all endemic to Australia and two of which (the crimson rosella and the Eastern rosella) are found in the state of South Australia. The tricky part of identifying them is their tendency to hybridize and the large number of color morphs and subspecies associated with each species. The two birds above appear to be most closely related to the crimson rosella, P. elegans. The left bird, the Adelaide rosella, is a hybrid of a red-morph and a yellow morph, and it has a mottled fiery color sort of a blend between its two parents. The right bird is more puzzling; it has a green-yellow color but red all around its head, as well as a blue chin. No adult bird of any species or subspecies has exactly this color pattern, so my best guess is that it is either a hybrid of its own that I have not seen before, or it is a juvenile bird; many juvenile rosella species and subspecies have a green color which in the case of the crimson rosella eventually gives way to the adult red color in the nominate subspecies.
Yeah I’m really sorry, I just have no idea what this bird is. It’s very pretty, it’s got a lovely long black tail, blue around the head, a little bit red on the throat, blue wings, and an olive-colored body. I’ll have a chat with some more bird-inclined friends about what this might be, but until then, skip.
Finally, nice clear pictures of easily identifiable birds. This is a pair of rainbow lorikeets, Trichoglossus haematodus. These birds are very colorful, moderately-sized, and found along the coast of eastern Australia from the northern tip of Queensland down through eastern and southeastern Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, and then just to the southeastern tip of South Australia, with this locale (around the Mount Lofty Ranges) close to the boundary of their range. Quite common throughout this area, some populations of the rainbow lorikeet are quite tame and very used to humans, and they have been successfully reared as pets.
I was very disappointed to have seen a pair of the iconic sulphur-crested cockatoos flying overhead in Melbourne but not gotten a picture of them. However, I did try to make it up in the end by finding a different species of cockatoo – the galah, Eolophus roseicapilla. It is a rather large parrot, and its bright pink coloration is really pretty stunning. This species is found throughout most of Australia excepting, again, the tropics of Queensland and the Northern Territory and exceptionally dry portions of the Outback.
Goodness me, birds are exhausting. Moving on:
Kangaroos
What else is there to say beyond the header?
These are Western gray kangaroos, found along the southern coast of Australia and into the central eastern parts of the continent, where they coexist (but only very rarely interbreed) with the Eastern gray kangaroo. In this area, they are the only species of kangaroo; however, they are quite common, being found both individually in rows of grapevines or in social groups (the collective nouns for which are mobs or occasionally courts) in more open areas.
Finally, some bonus videos:
Videos (Kangaroos and birds)
Although I did not manage to get a photograph of one, I did see (and hear) many laughing kookaburras, Dacelo novaeguineae. Although its scientific name is misleading (named after New Guinea, from which French explorers assumed the first specimens of the bird originated), its common name is true to its cackling, territorial call, which is often joined by other individuals in a cacophony which can last for minutes. The laughing kookaburra is the largest bird in the kingfisher family, but its most famous food is not fish but snakes. In this video, I managed to capture faintly some of these birds’ territorial calls (as well as a poor kangaroo in the beginning of the video).
Finally, don’t break your neck here…this is a video of me approaching the mob of kangaroos photographed earlier, in which I suddenly notice a single kangaroo hopping in the rows of grape vines, so I swivel the camera.
What’s next??
So that’s a wrap for the (large) animals I found at a winery in South Australia…in my next posts, I want to talk a bit about butterflies that I found there, as well as the wine of the Barossa region itself, and one more post with new aquatic finds…and then from there, I’ll move on to Hong Kong. Stay tuned.
Algal Ramblings 