This trip was less about birds and wildlife, and mainly focused on geocaching, but obviously I was still looking out for anything with feathers, fur or scales!
A few months ago, Erin and I found out about a Geocaching event happening at Monarto - Come Shoot C.P. with a Cannon! - and we decided not only to attend the event, but to make a weekend of it. We headed to Black Hill, nearly two hours drive from home, and further than we would go for a day trip, with the aim of completing the Fruit Loop series, a series of geocaches named after fruits.
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| Black Hill, South Australia |
It took us about five hours, but we did it! Most of the caches were fairly easy to find but some were a bit further from the road and required a short trek up a hill to find them. The series was originally 56 caches, but 3 had previously been archived, and we found the remaining 53 caches and were left with this pleasing loop of yellow smileys.
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| Fruit Loop Geocache Series - so many yellow smileys! |
Next we set off to find an Earthcache, for International Earthcache Day. This is a different type of geocache where there is no physical container to hunt for, but you are led to an interesting geological formation, and must answer questions about it, or take a photo. It's a great way of discovering different places you might never have looked at otherwise! We visited Shell Hill, an extremely ancient (millions of years old) oyster shell deposit. We answered the required questions and were able to log the cache and received our International Earthcache Day souvenir.
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| Shell Hill, South Australia |
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| International Earthcache Day (virtual) souvenir |
We stayed overnight in a cabin at the Punyelroo Caravan Park. It was a really nice park, right on the river's edge, and the cabin was clean and comfortable. We crossed the river on the ferry to go to the Swan Reach Hotel for dinner that night. On our way back, we noticed the signs depicting previous flood levels - 1956 was absolutely unimaginable!
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| Flood levels at Swan Reach Ferry Crossing |
We headed to Swan Reach Conservation Park (on the opposite side of the river from Swan Reach, but the same side as Punyelroo) to do some night-caching and hopefully night-birding. The first bird we could see from a distance, as a pair of glowing eyes on the track ahead. It flew away as we approached it, so I wasn't able to get a photo, but it was a lifer for me - a Spotted Nightjar! We didn't get to see that bird again, nor any other Nightjars, but we did come across this agreeable Tawny Frogmouth.
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| Tawny Frogmouth, Swan Reach CP, South Australia |
We drove along the track through the conservation park where a series of 31 OTD August geocaches were hidden. We decided not to wander off too far in the darkness and only searched for the ones close to the track, thinking we might come back in the morning for the rest. Halfway through the track got quite rough and rocky, and while were made it through without damaging the car apart from a few scratches, we decided a vehicle with higher clearance than my Corolla would be much better suited for this track - it was very slow-going for us to prevent damage.
As we were leaving the park, we saw a wombat run across the track ahead! This was really exciting as Erin had never seen wombats in the wild, and I had only ever seen them in Tasmania nine years ago. As we turned back onto the Stott Highway to head back to the Caravan Park we saw three more run across the road. We pulled over and could see there were burrows very close to the road. We sat and waited for a while and one emerged!
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| Southern Hairy-nosed Wombat, Swan Reach SA |
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| Southern Hairy-nosed Wombat, Swan Reach SA |
We saw several more wombats and lots of Kangaroos on our way back - this was quite late, about 11pm. Take care on the roads!
The following morning we crossed the river again to get some breakfast from the Riverview Takeaway, before crossing back and heading toward Sedan and Cambrai. We found a few more caches in the area, including one in the Meldanda Butterfly Garden at Cambrai. We didn't see any butterflies while we were there, but it looks like a nice spot.
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| Meldanda Butterfly Garden, Cambrai, SA |
After that we headed to Mannum for petrol and a few more geocaches, then on to Monarto for the geocaching event. We shot C.P. with a cannon*, and found a few of his geocaches around the hill, including another Earthcache. (*No geocachers were injured during this event)
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| View from C.P.'s geocaching event, Monarto, SA |
We were pretty tired by the time we left the event, and it was starting to rain, so we headed home.
We had a great weekend, finding 85 geocaches - a new weekend record for us, and a new daily record of 71 for Saturday. The other highlight was of course getting a glimpse of the Spotted Nightjar, and seeing all of those Wombats!
