Natural splendour, real musics, wines, wordpower
Killiecrankie Bay is on the northwestern side of Flinders Island.
Both of this post’s photos offer a wide angle view (32 mm).
The featured image looks north, from the southern half of the bay’s shoreline.
Its high point – Mount Killiecrankie – rises circa 316 metres above sea level.
(Alleged altitude readings for Flinders Island’s peaks are highly unreliable/inconsistent. Some add another couple of metres to Mt Killiecrankie. Others lop 30 metres off it!)
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None of Australia’s 10 fairywrens are “true” wrens.
However, all are truly beautiful.
3 equally beautiful species: superb fairywren, splendid fairywren and lovely fairywren.
The last-named lives only in near-coastal parts of Queensland’s Cape York Peninsula; the other two have much wider ranges.
When southeastern Australians wax lyrical about “blue wrens” they usually have in mind the “superb” species, whilst a southwestern Australian is probably thinking of the “splendid” kind.
On Flinders Island all “blue wrens” are “superb”, albeit members of the island’s own subspecies of Malurus cyaneus.
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The first three photos in this post were taken within a “window” of just one minute.
At 6.38 pm on 17 March 2025 the sun was low; it would soon “sink” into Bass Strait.
”Paradoxically” (not, in fact) this circumstance saw the west-facing, upper reaches of Strzelecki National Park bathed in “gold”, whilst their lower flanks were “greyed” by shade.
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…with a cloudy backdrop: I love what happen when simultaneously-present sunbeams and clouds dapple steep slopes.
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A recipe for quiet delight…
1: Be in a place with dramatic topography (ideally, clad with both forest and exposed rock faces and/or outcrops) and oft-changing weather.
2: Find a comfortable vantage point, with late afternoon sun behind you, dramatic topography in front, and a sky that is neither cloudless nor overcast. Ideally, bring camera/s and/or binoculars.
3: Watch closely, as clouds form, dance, dissolve, whilst the sunlight becomes progressively lovelier as its daily “disappearance” draws closer.
A “static” landscape – even a “stolid” one – becomes deliciously dynamic when “golden hour” sunlight and shadows move across it.
(The southwestern corner of Flinders Island is an ideal location)
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Some animals’ tongues are much longer than most humans imagine!
In the late afternoon & early evening of 17 May 2025 many Bennett’s wallabies were grazing the grassy grounds of Mountain Seas Lodge.
They are a mostly-solitary species – a marked contrast to the highly-sociable ‘roos that have brightened so many of my days, across seven decades.
These Bennett’s wallabies were large in number, but definitely not a “herd”, nor an “extended family”.
The pictured individuals, like most of their fellows, were “solo diners”.
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Come late afternoon on 17 March 2025, we were comfortably ensconced in an upstairs room.
Ever-growing numbers of wallabies were emerging from the wooded, lower slopes of the “roof” of Flinders Island, in order to graze the immediate surrounds of Mountain Seas Lodge.
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Strzelecki National Park’s signature features are its glorious, unspoilt beaches and the hills that tower above them.
Generally, the hills have well-wooded lower slopes, which eventually yield to quasi-naked granite.
The above photo was taken just a few minutes after I and the previous post’s star had been mutually-surprised, but unalarmed…just a few wallaby-hops distant from this post’s vantage point.
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20 minutes after the wedgetail “fly-by” (see #5 in this series), I enjoyed a much more intimate, ground-level, animal encounter.
Pictured is Notamacropus rufogriseus – a species which is particularly abundant in Tasmania, but is also common through much of eastern Australia’s coastal scrub and sclerophyll forests.
In Tasmania it is generally known as “Bennett’s wallaby”; in mainland Australia the more common name is “red-necked wallaby”; some humans regard the Tasmanians and the mainlanders as two distinct subspecies.
Doubtless, some would say the same of the two relevant human populations!
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Just a few minutes after I’d photographed the Strzelecki peaks’ seaward-facing side, I noticed a large raptor, gliding above the nearby beach.
It was soon obvious that s/he was a wedge-tailed eagle – Australia’s largest raptor, and one of the world’s bigger eagles.
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