Rainbow Pitta

We stopped here at Howard Springs Nature Park on our way out of Darwin, to do a little birdwatching. The spring-fed pool here is popular for swimming, and it was used as a recreation camp for soldiers during World War II.




Here is a pretty good sized Barramundi, seen from the dam along the pool, in its pre-burger form.




This little guy is a Rainbow Pitta. Birdwatching for me is a bit like hunting for treasure. Australia has some 770 species of birds and over three trips we've seen over 300 of them. Of course, some birds are harder to find than others, and the real prizes are the endemic rarities. Many of these harder to find birds require knowledge of local lore (and lots of luck) to find. Some of the suggestions for Gouldian Finches were along the lines of: drive 20km out of town on the highway until you come to an unmarked creek crossing... 100 yards past that turn on the dirt track, drive until you get to the old highway, park, walk diagonally across the old road to the creek, walk up the dry creekbed until you get to the third pool of standing water, and wait there at dawn until the birds show up. Which they probably won't.

We dipped (birdwatcher lingo for "totally missed out") on many of the guys I was looking for, but at least we finally saw a darn pitta. I had a chance to see them in Borneo, and again on our last trip to Australia, but they always eluded me. They are very shy, and despite their bright colors, hard to see in the dense rainforest. I had read, however, that this particular species of pitta was pretty much guaranteed if you went to Howard Springs, walked on the nature trail, and hung out at the bridge. Which we did, and sure enough, there he was, though he was sneaky and we got only the briefest look. We saw another one further down the trail, but again, he was around for only a few seconds and Darrin didn't see him at all. After an hour of this we decided to call it good and made a pit stop at the restrooms by the parking lot. As we were leaving I was literally in the middle of uttering "I'm sorry you didn't get a better look" to Darrin, when he said, "Isn't that one?" and pointed to this little guy, who was not 10 feet away from us, and very cooperative in allowing us to shoot his picture. This birdwatching-is-better-by-the-bathrooms so why'd-you-bother-going-on-that-hike scenario occured with some regularity on the trip.