Here's a brief summary of my time camping on the weekend, with photos again making up the bulk of the content!


We went to the Goomburra seciton of the world heritage listed Main Range National Park (for interested Brisbanites, Goomburra is about 2 hours away on the other side of Cunningham’s Gap). The drive is nice in itself because a lot of it is through national park or rural landscapes like this:



The camping ground was nice and shady thanks to lots of what I’m told are Manna Gums. It wasn’t too busy, either:



I spent a lot of time reading, including in a hammock (bliss), and watching birds. We had currawongs, magpies and satin bowerbirds hop curiously through the campsite when no one was nearby. They were very thorough, with the bowerbirds going so far as to stick their heads down cups to check for food scraps! Unfortunately for them, we carefully had packed all our food away. I tried to get photos of the quick little fairy wrens that played around my chair but they obstinately darted out of the camera frame. Here is a female superb fairy wren* doing just that:



Being able to hear birds clearly is one of the aspects of camping I love most. As well as the beautiful and noisy dawn chorus (which I half sleep through), there were mopoke owls around at night. OK, they’re actually called Boobook Owls, but all right-minded people call them mopokes due to their call (there's an audio clip on the right hand side of that linked page). It’s very clear to me that they say "MO-POKE" not boobook :).

We also went for a few short walks in the area. We even caught sight of the cute brush-tailed rock wallabies although they were a bit camera shy so I don't have a photo! The continuing drought was very obvious to those of us who visited Goomburra before – there was hardly any water compared to my last visit a couple of years ago. However, looking at some of the photos of the nearby rainforest, you wouldn’t necessarily notice:



*possibly a variegated fairy wren. But the little male looked like a non-breeding superb so that's my guess.

Tags: birds, travel