Saturday, Oct 29 - The Gluepot Reserve

Before I tell you about our day at Gluepot, I have to tell you about the Qantas disaster, since I don’t know if it’s been reported on US TV. There was a Qantas stockholders meeting on Friday at which the Qantas workers were protesting and the stockholders voted a 70% increase in Alan Joyce’s (the CEO) salary! Today when we got back at 7 PM and turned on the TV, we found out that Joyce, without telling anyone in the company or the government, had cancelled all Qantas flights all over the world!! This is a company that has been very profitable through the world-wide recession, while paying decent wages to its employees. What Joyce (who is not even Australian, but Irish), wants is to make even more money by screwing the Aussie workers and unions by hiring cheap Asian labor. Really outrageous!! Qantas and Australia are synonymous - the government has to step up and settle this and protect the Australian workers!

For us, its not certain if we can get to Brisbane on Tuesday (we’re officially on Jet Star, a subsidiary of Qantas, and according to the TV, Jet Star is still flying. Who knows about returning to the US on November 15? More later!

Anyway, we got up at six, and cooked breakfast in our little kitchen. We had bought bacon which in Australia is bacon, plus the Canadian bacon attached, so quite a treat; plus eggs and a roll, and then I made up sandwiches out of left-over chicken from last night, and we set off for the Gluepot. We drove through town to the ferry which, like yesterday’s ferry at Cadell, was free and operates 24 hours…what a service!

We drove to the turn off to the Gluepot Reserve and got on the dirt road north. We drove past orange groves and grape vines and through four gates, each with a different type of latch (my challenge!). The washboard surface of the road was quite rough and continued on for about 30 miles. As we approached one farm, a truck flew out in front of us, obviously going on the theory that flying over washboard is easier than bumping slowly along, but just barely avoided a nasty crash with us…very scary! As we approached the Reserve, it became clear that the rain that we experienced yesterday was even stronger here as we found ourselves driving through huge puddles. Even though we were driving the Monster in 4wd, we found ourselves sliding and skidding through some of the mud, but finally got to the visitors’ centre and got some trail maps so we could orient ourselves.

We first took a botanical walk which identified about twenty typical mallee plants: four different eucalyptus, flowering shrubs, plants used by aboriginals, etc. We then took a three mile hike to a bird hide overlooking a pool of water where we watched Mallee Ring-necked Parrots, Mulga Parrots and Yellow-Plumed Honey Eaters coming in to drink. There was a box of forms that requested that we record all the species we saw, so I went over to get one and reached in and a huge grey spider leapt onto my hand. Bob says I shrieked and the poor spider fell to the floor boards which fortunately were widely spaced so she struggled to get her fat brown body though, but she finally did! Needless to say, I added Giant Grey Spider to the list of species observed!!

 (pic: Mallee Ring-necked Parrots)

We returned to the car and ate our chicken sandwiches and drove on to another trail on which the rare and very desirable Scarlet-breasted Parrot has been seen. We parked with another car that was full of birders with very large camera lenses, tripods and very good binoculars. We suggested that they take off first, but they demurred and we set off. After a bit, we looked back and they were nowhere to be seen…..they obviously had some secret mission (probably the SB Parrot!)and didn’t want us along!!! If you’ve seen the terrific new movie, “The Big Year” with Owen Wilson, Jack Black and Steve Martin, you know how competitive birders can be!

We did a bit more birding and saw some beautiful Rainbow Bee eaters, and parakeets, just like my childhood pet, Flip! A lovely day with beautiful scenery and birds, and four new life birds; White-browed Wood swallow, Yellow Rosella, Brown Tree Creeper, and the beautiful Chestnut Quail-Thrush!

We returned to Waikerie at 6:30 and before returning to our trailer park, dashed into town and ordered a pizza at a cute little shop and picked up a bottle of wine at the Woolworth’s. As we were sitting in the car waiting for the pizza to be ready, the charming girl in the pizza shop came out with our pie, and delivered it to our car! Aussies are so nice and friendly! Back to our trailer for dinner and Qantas news!