We began by heading out in the early morning to Tiger Brennan Drive, hoping that the somewhat saner weather would cause us to be more successful. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Little more than an endless onslaught of brown honeyeaters was observed.
Having failed to see anything of interest here, we moved onto Charles Darwin National Park. I had been warned that the sandflies here were problematic, and I can attest to this being the case. I was covered in insect repellent, but still emerged from the place with my skin covered in sandfly bites.
We drove into the carpark to observe several black-faced cuckooshrikes. We walked swiftly down to the mangroves, seeing a double-barred finch and some assorted honeyeaters along the way. Asides from our later cruise, we had our most luck with the area's mangrove specialities here . . . not that that's saying much. We managed to find a small flock of red-headed honeyeaters, though I failed to get a good enough picture of them to show here.
We returned to the carpark to discover that my dad had somehow lost the car keys in the mangroves. I stood in the carpark and watched the car for an agonising hour (or at least that's how long it felt), while my dad tried to figure out where they had slipped out of his pocket. As the seemingly limitless sandflies bit at me in the carpark and (I'm told) at my dad in the mangroves, our insect repellent proved completely useless.
As a consolation prize, I managed to observe a fair few honeyeaters feeding on blossoming eucalypts while I waited for my dad. Though no new species were seen, I got the best views of silver-crowned friarbird and rufous-throated honeyeater of the trip here. By the trip's end we had made a fairly clean sweep of all the area's honeyeater species save for black-chinned honeyeater, but waiting here and watching the blossoms seemed a productive way to tick them off for any future visitor. Just please, for the love of God, don't make our mistake. Bring an insect repellent that works.
RUFOUS-THROATED HONEYEATER
SILVER-CROWNED FRIARBIRD
After this rather traumatising experience ended with my dad finding the car keys, we rested in our hotel room the remainder of the day, trying to avoid the urge to scratch the countless sandfly bites. At night we went out to a Sri Lankan restaurant in Nightcliff, where we were pleasantly surprised by how brilliant the food was. Even I, who usually loathes Sri Lankan food, thoroughly enjoyed the meal. A stop to photograph an adorable pair of Torresian imperial-pigeons preening beside the road certainly added to my enjoyment.
TORRESIAN IMPERIAL-PIGEON
We then called it a night and rested well.
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