BIRDING THE MORNINGTON PENINSULA

For the Australia Day long weekend my family and I travelled to Sorrento in the Mornington Peninsula, roughly an hour away from Melbourne, to spend the night. We saw a lot of wildlife during the trip.
When we arrived in Sorrento, at around lunchtime, we immediately went to the Sorrento pier to board a Moonraker Dolphin Watching cruise. The boat traveled quickly and the waters of Port Phillip Bay were fairly calm, with nobody on board being seasick. Acting on a tipoff, we travelled to where a group of Burrunan Dolphins had been seen. Almost immediately after arriving at the site we were given unbelievable views of a group of 6 Burrunan Dolphins, with a few short-tailed shearwaters and Australian gannets flying around the boat as well.

A group of three Burrunan dolphins surfaces from the ocean

This large flock of short-tailed shearwaters flew off in the distance when we arrived

The Burrunan Dolphin has recently been split from the common bottlenose dolphin and is endemic to Victoria: the only known populations are in Port Phillip Bay and the Gippsland Lakes. It was amazing to finally see one of these rare dolphins in the flesh!
We then visited two other sites: Chinaman's Hat and Popes Eye. Chinaman's Hat is an artificial structure in the middle of Port Phillip Bay, created as a resting site for Australian fur seals. Male fur seals born at the Seal Rocks swim here as they grow up. The females all remain at Seal Rocks (a seal breeding colony in Phillip Island).

The boat behind the seals belongs to another tour company

The Chinaman's Hat was made for the purpose of providing a resting site for these seals

Our final destination on the cruise was Pope's Eye, an abandoned military fort that is now a great snorkelling site and home to a colony of Australasian gannets.

These two Australasian gannets were very close to the boat

Here you can see both the young and adult Australasian gannets

After that we returned to shore, headed to our hotel and relaxed until night. We quickly rushed to the Moonlit Sanctuary, arriving at around 8 pm. This sanctuary offers night tours that let you get up close and personal with a variety of wildlife, allowing the hand-feeding of kangaroos, wallabies and various gliders. Though I didn't take much photographs of the captive animals (being too busy feeding and petting them) I did see two wild possums: a brush tailed possum and a ring-tailed possum, which I photographed.

The brush-tailed possum is the largest of the Melbourne area's two commonest possums

In contrast, the ring-tailed possum is much smaller and shyer

The moon was apparently tinted red by the smoke of Tasmanian bushfires

After leaving the sanctuary and sleeping, the next morning my father and I woke up to visit Cape Schanck. Once we got to the Cape we found out that it was off-bounds due to a search mission going on, so we headed to Point Nepean and walked along Defence Road from Gunners Cottage. The forest here was quite birdy, with small birds like white-browed scrubwren, silvereye, superb fairy-wren and yellow-faced honeyeater all present. However, the best birds appeared once we got to the top of the walk. In the air were several distant lifer fork-tailed swifts, as well as a quick white-throated needle tail  Finally, a large flock of spiny-cheeked honeyeaters flew through and allowed excellent photos.

This spiny-cheeked honeyeater posed nicely atop a tree

After that we headed to the Peninsula Hot Springs for a swim before travelling home. 

In short, the trip was extremely successful and showed what kind of great wildlife lies just within 2 hours of the Melbourne CBD.