West 2 ~ Cape Range & Ningaloo

When we travelled south through WA back in April we thought about making the side trip up the North West Cape to Cape Range, but it was still too hot, and Little Bird was still too small, and everything was too exposed - trees not being a major feature of the landscape here - so we bypassed it.  We got our taste of Ningaloo Reef at Coral Bay, and then kept motoring southward.  Not this time.  I'd booked 3 nights at Kurrajong campground, just behind the sand dunes (like every other campsite we saw in the park), so when we arrived in the afternoon our site was all ready for us.  Over the next couple of days we went walking up through the range at Mandu Mandu Gorge and Yardie Creek Gorge, riding bikes and skateboards up and down the roads, and snorkelling at the Oyster Stacks, Turquoise Bay, and just off the beach at our campsite.

The whole peninsula is basically made of limestone, making it prime caving territory, with at least 600 caves in the area.  As usual, their locations are kept secret so that clowns like us don't go crawling down them and get stuck.  That didn't stop us looking though, and we ended up finding a couple of promising holes in the ground, but the best of them were blocked up with rock fig roots, so we never managed to find something we could squeeze into.

The snorkelling was amazing, and we got in the water at least a couple of times each day.  The national park covers a long stretch of coast with Ningaloo Reef immediately off shore, so anywhere you stop and jump into the water is rewarded immediately with coral reefs and fish.  We both thought it was some of the best snorkelling we've ever done, and definitely the most impressive coral gardens we've ever seen.  Much better than anywhere on the Great Barrier Reef that we've seen.  We spotted a lot of big fish, as well as a couple of turtles, some eels, a shark, a big stingray and a humpback dolphin.

A little highlight for me was the birds at our campsite.  There was a constant twittering in the scrub around us, but I struggled to get a look at which birds were there.  Each morning and evening I prowled around with my binoculars and camera trying to get a glimpse, but the best I got was a little wren-shaped bird disappearing over a sand dune in the evening twilight.  Turning my fount of knowledge - my phone - I worked out that they were most likely to be white-winged fairy-wrens.  Still I struggled to get a look to confirm.  Finally, as our second last morning was wearing out, I stepped out the door of the camper and right in front of me, about three metres away, were three or four little birds on some sticks.  All but one were the usual vague brown fairy-wrens, but one was a male in his breeding colours: dark all over except for a patch of white on each wing.  He disappeared instantly, but it was enough for me to confirm the sighting.  Fairy-wrens are a bit of a favourite bird of ours, and I've given myself the challenge of seeing all the different species in Australia.  We've see our Superbs at Saltwater Creek and Splendids at the West Macs, Red-Backed at Parry's Creek Lagoon and Red-Winged at Pemberton, and we've seen Variegated Fairy-Wrens pretty much everywhere.  Adding White-Winged to the list, I'm now left with three more: Purple-Crowned, that we hope to see on some future ventures through the Kimberley; Blue-Breasted, that we might spot on another trip to southern WA; and Lovely, that will have to wait until we go to Cape York some day.  After that I guess we'll have to go to PNG to see the rest of the world's fairy-wrens.

One last highlight was spotting a couple of Black-Footed Rock-Wallabies at Yardie Creek Gorge.  There's only up to about forty of these shy little creatures living around the gorge, apparently they used to be a lot more common before foxes cleared them out in all but the most inaccessible places.