YOUNG BIRDER'S NOTES: LORD HOWE ISLAND: The Coast and Reef

The beaches around Lord Howe are of particularly great quality. The one we spent most time around was Ned's Beach. This beach is known for its population of tame fish, used to being hand-fed by tourists. I noticed many silver drummers, sand mullet, yellow-green wrasse, green-blocked wrasse, spangled emperors, Australian salmon and even a few endemic doubleheader wrasse. While wading into the water with my camera I managed to photograph several different species swimming around.

A yellow-green wrasse (top) swimming with a green-blocked wrasse (bottom)

Red-tipped urchins like this one are common in the waters around Lord Howe

This sea cucumber (Holothurian leucospilota) is also an abundant species

I believe this large fish to be a young spangled emperor

The silver grunter is known locally as the stinker, as its flesh is said to taste disgusting

Sand mullet such as this one were common around pretty much all the beaches we visited

We only saw one of these eastern garfish and after feeding we couldn't locate it

Another place we viewed life from on the island coast was the jetty. Just below the jetty, before our pelagic left, I saw a massive black stingray swimming around.

Apparently black rays like this one are a common sight around the jetty

A variety of birds also inhabit the areas around the coast. Ned's Beach was home to a small population of migrant ruddy turnstones and I also saw a distant Nankeen kestrel hunting around the cliffs there. Around the jetty Ian Hutton showed me a colony of wedge-tailed shearwaters and we weighed their chicks to collect data, however I didn't get any photos of the babies.

Several breeding plumaged ruddy turnstones on the beach allowed great views

At North Bay, a pristine beach we visited on a snorkelling tour, there was a mixed colony of black noddies and common noddies. There were also several distant sooty terns flying around North Bay, along with a single juvenile tern that didn't seem to know how to fly.

This juvenile sooty tern most likely died soon after this photo, as it couldn't fly

A large flock of roosting common noddies, with several black noddies in the foreground

Finally, white terns were common wherever we went, using the large Norfolk pines near the lagoon beach as nesting sites. In the morning about 60 terns could be seen wheeling over the lagoon. Though none of the terns were laying eggs, some of the terns had chicks.

Lord Howe Island is one of only a few places in Australia where white terns breed

These two white terns were squawking angrily at each other

While we were on the island this little tern chick fledged and left its nest

We saw this chick at Wilson's Bike Shop: some of the locals run 'tern orphanages'

The reef of Lord Howe Island was also extremely beautiful. We went snorkelling and glass-bottom boating in the reef 4 times over our stay. Apart from a myriad of different fish, highlights included seeing a young Galapagos shark, watching a Cook's scorpionfish camouflage into the reef bed, getting close views of a swimming green sea turtle and enjoying the colours of a rather tame Moorish idol. Unfortunately since I don't have a waterproof camera I wasn't able to photograph any of this, though I did my best through the glass bottom of the boat.