Southwest Kangaroo Island

 Most of today was very windy, chilly, and occasionally rainy as we made our way to the southwest corner of Kangaroo Island. The locals referred to it as winter weather. Kangaroo Island is so far south that the next landmass to the west is South America: that gives a lot of time and space for wind to accumulate. Our hosts for dinner, the leaders of the local tour company, made a fire at their home to help us warm up. They commented that we should remember that we needed a fire on February 2nd, as it should be high summer!

We learned a great deal about the devastating bushfire of December 2019-January 2020, a consequence of drought, hot dry weather, gale force winds and highly flammable timber plantations.  The fire lasted for six weeks and burned about two-thirds of the island, including 90 homes, 60,000 sheep, and huge numbers of wildlife. The impact of the fires, followed immediately by the pandemic, on the 5,000 inhabitants has been enormous. It helped us to understand why rain in the summer is such a blessing to them, as it is the hot dry summer weather that creates bushfire risk. The island also has a lot of laterite, an iron rich mineral that attracts lightning strikes. The landscape is recovering more quickly than people expected. Small animals also survived better than expected; the disaster prompted an increase in conservation and research funding so that more is known now about some species than ever before.  We saw koalas and kangaroos in the new scrub, but bird life will be slow to recover.

We also heard yet again about the scourge of feral cats. These creatures have grown to be bigger than bobcats, and eat anything that moves (wildlife as well as domesticated animals such as lambs). In the western part of the island volunteers are using camera traps to identify the location of cats to be captured and removed — sadly last nights camera also took a photo of a feral cat with an endangered bandicoot in its mouth.

At the far southwest tip of the island we stopped at a lighthouse and walked down almost to sea level. The wind (40 mph without the gusts) created 30 foot high waves, which crashed all around the sunbathing fur seals and sea lions. Despite the rough waves,  some of them played out in the surf.  We could have watched them for hours. We also stopped to see the Remarkable Rocks, a granite outcropping that has been carved into fantastic shapes by millennia of wind and salt water. 

At dinner, we saw a Scarlet Robin, a bird we were hoping to see, and a brush-tailed possum and her joey (living in the children's treehouse). On our way back from dinner, we finally saw an echidna. Initially we saw it crossing the road. By the time we unloaded from the van it was safely hiding under a shrub off the road. The local echidnas can be blond, red-headed or dark, while those on Tasmania are all dark. Tonight’s echidna was a blond. 

Pictured: Long-nosed Fur Seal in the surf, Scarlet Robin, Brush-tailed Possum, Koala