Mooching around Mallacoota, Victoria

Caravan Park, Mallacoota, far eastern Victoria

Last January we had a holiday in Sydney and then drove to Melbourne via  Canberra and the south coast. From Eden we drove on towards Mallacoota along a section of the coast we had never visited before.

Our first impressions of Mallacoota were very favourable. The town is on a river estuary and the setting is quite charming. We plan to return here with our caravan some day and stay for a week or more. We intend avoiding the summer holidays. As you can see in the photo above, the caravan park on the foreshore is wall-to-wall tents, caravans, boats, bikes, cars and 4WDs. Not my idea of a quiet holiday spot.

After a very nice meal of seafood in the hotel bistro, we decided to go for a long walk around town in the cool of the evening. I was hoping to get a good list of birds for this area and some photos would have been a bonus.

It was with delight and a little surprise that the first bird I saw upon leaving our motel room was a Common Bronzewing pigeon, shown in the photo below. I am quite used to seeing this species feeding on the sides of roads or flying rapidly across the road in front of the car while driving. I am used to seeing this bird out bush and relatively remote, or least quiet, places. But here was this individual feeding on the lawn a few steps from the back of the motel. It was one street from the main shopping strip and a busy spot. This bird was cautious but not over alarmed by our presence. It was a nice sighting and one of only a handful  of this species seen on the entire journey of about 3500km.

Common Bronzewing pigeon, Mallacoota, eastern Victoria