What’s up at Christmas Eve in Australia?

Christmas Eve in Australia. How will this work out?

Well what can I say. The day was more or less as it used to be back home on Sweden where I drive around to meet my parents, but also go to Maria’s mothers place. That means I do a share amount of driving on Christmas Eve.

I will not go through the complete day, but we visited two different places during the day and both were successful.

The first trip went to Gowrie Park where we met Jim an old friend of Charlotte, one of Maria’s cousins. He lived just at Gowrie Park and there we did a morning walk in the bush looking for birds.

Jim was a knowledgable man and it was nice to have such an expert on a walk like this. He told us many interesting things about the endemic birds and their social structure as there are a few species that actually raise their young in what I would call small ”breeding colonies.” For example the colonies of the Superb Fairywren consist of the breeding couple and a few male juvenile birds from former hatches.

The walk wasn´t as productive as it could have been, but still I got a couple of nice pictures. The best is the one of the male Superb Fairywren. It was hard to get anything that looked better than this as there always was some twigs or grass straws in the way.

After the morning trip we regrouped in Devonport. There I called Qantas to see what had happened with my luggage. It were to arrive later and that was great news as both my cameras had run out of battery during the Gowrie Park trip.

That meant we were to head out to Narawntapu National Park for an evening excursion. Narawntapu is called the Serengeti of Tasmania and it is the only place I felt I had to go to during the stay in Tasmania.

So did Narawntapu live up to my expectations? Well yes.

I would have liked to get there a couple of hours earlier just to walk around to get a feeling for the place. I also would like to visit the bird hide there to see what it can produce.

Sadly the light faded fast, but still we got there in time to at least see all the animals and get a couple of decent pictures. It was nice to get the picture of the young Wallby in its mother’s pouch and also see some fighting between male Wallabies. Still the best picture in my opinion is the Wombat picture.

I like that one because it is something more than just a picture of an animal. In this picture you also see the habitat in which the Wombat lives. It comes out from the burrow in the evening to graze. It is constantly grazing so to get a picture like this when it actually has its head raise was nice.

I would say that this Christmas wasn´t a normal Christmas. It was really nice and I appreciated both trips and that my luggage arrived safely in Devonport.

I hope you appreciate the gallery as much as I do.

Photo Gallery: What’s up at Christmas Eve in Australia?