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Bruny Island Revisited | |
03/27/08 |
              
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On the weekend of June 17th, we drove down to Kettering and hopped the ferry to Bruny Island. We had never spent the night on the island and Mary had a a day off, so this was the weekend. We rented a self contained cottage at Adventure Bay Holiday Park and signed up for a nature tour through Inala. The nature tour started off at the farm, Inala, and then progressed to the south end of the island at Cape Bruny Lighthouse and Jetty Beach. That evening as we drove over the mountain back to the holiday park we saw our first white wallaby, an albino that occurs with regularity on Bruny Island. There were quite a few of them in the paddock behind the park and we took a little stroll into the bush to get a good look. We drove north from the holiday park then stopped at the Fairy Penguin Rookery at the The Neck and got out of the car under a clear, moonless sky covered in stars. The Southern Cross was directly over head and the Milky Way spread from the horizon to the east of us in the Tasman Sea back over our shoulders to the top of the dunes of The Neck. The otherworldly sound of the penguins as they conducted nighttime penguin business was overwhelming as we walked in the near darkness and just marveled at what we were hearing. Listen to the sounds of the rookery. From the rookery, we continued north spotting ringtailed and brushtail possums, the latter in both its normal, black/red/brown phase and its less common gold color phase. We even spotted a couple of Eastern Quolls, the other carnivorous marsupial of Tasmania. The next day we took the trail to Grassy Point at the east end of Adventure Bay and then headed up to the top of Fluted Cape on a trail that took us through open forest and along the steep dolerite cliffs of the eastern face of the cape. The
picture above is of Fluted Cape from the north end of the beach at
Adventure Bay. Penguin Island can be seen to the left of the cape.
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This site was last updated 09/04/06
