Sunrise With the Wallabies at Cape Hillsborough NP

Just north of Mackay is Cape Hillsborough National Park where the wallabies come down to the beach at sunrise every morning, what a sight!  They don’t seem to mind people watching them eat their breakfast and it makes for such a memorable morning. We stepped onto the beach and saw wallabies off in the distance.  We made our way down there and got there just as a man walked out onto the beach dropping food for them as he went.  It used to be the wallabies came down to the beach for mangrove seeds and seaweed that the tide had stirred up.  At some point they must have decided to ensure the wallabies would show up each morning.  They’d obviously been waiting for their breakfast, but he didn’t interact with them at all, just dropped the seed and continued down the beach, never looking back.  What a lovely way to start your day, feeding the wallabies and a morning stroll on the beach! I am not a fan of using my camera flash, it alters the colours so much.  But I got a good picture of everyone.  TurboBug was half asleep.  LadyBug is pretending to be a wallaby. When we got closer we could see that most of the wallabies were actually kangaroos.  All the tourist literature talks about wallabies, I’m sure it depends on who’s hungry!  This kangaroo bounded over in our direction and stopped directly in front of the kids. (I’m glad he stopped when he did!) I suppose he was hoping we’d have handouts and knew that kids are likely candidates. He just stood there in front of us for a few minutes, twisting this way and that, ignoring the giggles from the kids. After he left we inspected his footprints.  See the trail going right up in front of the person in the background?  She was busy focusing her camera and didn’t know he was coming.  She got quite the fright when he jumped in front of her lens! Finding a mum with a joey is always fascinating.  So often it’s the feet or an ear sticking out of the pouch, but this time we could see a little face! Here’s some classic kangaroo silhouettes!  They can move so fast.  [Side note: when we visited Australia ages ago, before children, we unexpectedly found ourselves in a mob of roos bounding across the paddock as we were getting into our car.  It was like a stream of them coming our direction which split in two to go around the car.  The sound of all those roos jumping and their speed was amazing.] The wallabies (or roos) slowly disappeared back into the bush.  I’m sure they would be back the next morning. Then we told the kids we’d be walking down to the end of the beach. At low tide you can walk along a causeway to get out to Wedge Island.  We could see the causeway so headed over for a look.  While we watched the sunrise.  On the beach.  Have you ever watched the sunrise on the beach?  It’s lovely. It looked like the tide was coming in, so walking over to the island was not going to happen for us.  We weren’t really prepared for it anyway.  But threatening the kids with a long walk so early in the morning was fun while it lasted [insert evil laugh]. So we made our way back, exploring along the way. And then as we were leaving we reached this stretch of road where there were all these butterflies in the sky, so we stopped and we really did make the kids do a (not-too-long) walk early in the morning!  Yes, we are that cruel.  Next post, please…