Natural splendour, real musics, wines, wordpower
As regular readers would already know, the Coorong is one of our favourite places.
This series is the fruit of our most recent visit, on 13 March 2024.
In the wake of the 2022-23 floods – which produced the Murray-Darling river system’s biggest flows in many years – the Coorong was enjoying better overall “”health” than had been the case over the preceding several decades.
Most tourist visitors enter the Coorong via the Goolwa Barrage, where this series begins.
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This sequel to previous post is the fruit of summertime visits, pre-pandemic.
Warmer days offer their own particular photographic opportunities and challenges.
Heat haze and mirages can render some “long lens shots” utterly pointless.
However, they can be the making of others.
One CommentThe featured image and the one below were both taken from a boat on the Coorong-proper – Australia’s longest lagoon.
Both photos look across its waters to the Younghusband Peninsula – the dune field that separates the Coorong from the Southern Ocean.
Sand and water are the Coorong National Park’s key components.
The former arrives via wind, and Southern Ocean waves.
Most of the “fresh”-ish supply of the latter is delivered by the Murray-Darling river system.
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The featured image’s Southern Ocean waves are breaking on the Younghusband Peninsula’s narrowest, northernmost section.
The peninsula’s tip is the southern “lip” of the mouth of Australia’s biggest river system; the cormorants are on the “freshwater side”, as was yours truly at 3.35 pm on 30 March 2022.
If you have never been to this spot, you may be thinking, “it looks splendidly wild, barely touched by humans”.
Alas, you would be very wrong….
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Over the last 15 years seals have become an increasingly common/obvious presence in the Coorong-proper and on/around the Goolwa Barrage.
This has delighted some people, but infuriated/worried some others.
Some of the infuriated/worried people perceive the seals as “intruders”, as “fish thieves”, as “out of control”, “a threat to fish and bird populations”.
So, who are these seals, are they “newcomers”, and are they a threat to “the natural balance”?
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When an Australian thinks of seagulls, the relevant species is almost certainly our most common, emblematic one.
Chroicocephalus novaehollandiae – the Silver gull – has prospered mightily, post-1788.
Arguably, this highly-adaptable bird should no longer be described as a “seagull”.
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One of the pleasures of Australian life is to look up and see pelicans “surfing the thermals”, soaring, spiralling ever-higher, with so very little apparent effort.
They are also wonderful to watch as they take off from water (or land on it); then, however, a great amount of effort is spectacularly evident.
Pelicans are one of “our” world’s largest, living, flying “machines”.
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Having just returned to WA, after three (mostly, offline) weeks in South Australia, Pelican Yoga today interrupts the ongoing “Aspects of Waychinicup” series.
This post foreshadows a two-part series; each chapter will celebrate a very different species, on the wing.
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According to what most people believe, this post’s flightless bird is a perfect symbol for “moving forward in 2021”.
After all, aren’t the emu and the kangaroo Australia’s heraldic beasts precisely because neither is capable of taking a backward step?
Self-styled “rational” adults delight in having long ago discovered the truth about Santa.
However, even many self-styled “scientists” still believe that emus cannot walk backwards.
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Leading by example: an Australian pelican, in South Australia’s Coorong National Park.
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