Kangaroo Island Wildlife & Conservation Journey

Your driver meets you at Kingscote Airport or the Penneshaw ferry terminal and takes you to the Mercure Kangaroo Island Lodge at American River. Transfer times match your flight or ferry, so there is no fixed start. American River sits on Pelican Lagoon on the island’s eastern side and has about 280 residents. The name comes from a crew of American sealers who camped here for four months in 1803 and built a 35-ton schooner, the Independence, out of local timber. The afternoon is yours. There are no scheduled activities. Overnight: American River. Meals: none.

Breakfast at the lodge, then a pickup from the lobby at about 9am; your guide confirms the time when you check in. The morning is at Cygnet Park with an ecologist from BioR, the not-for-profit that has been rebuilding habitat here since 2002. Mist nets go up and birds are caught, banded, measured and released under the Australian Bird and Bat Banding Scheme, which is how BioR tracks whether its 175 ha of plantings are holding birds. The species of the day is usually the Kangaroo Island glossy black-cockatoo, a subspecies that lives nowhere else, feeds almost entirely on the seed of drooping sheoak (Allocasuarina verticillata) and lost more than half its feeding habitat in the 2019–20 fires. Around 36 of them use Cygnet Park, roughly eight per cent of the island population. They are quieter and slower than most cockatoos, which is a surprise the first time you hear one. Morning tea is taken in the field. Stokes Bay next, on the north coast, where a marked route squeezes through a tunnel in the cliff and comes out on a beach hidden from the car park. Lunch is a barbecue at a private bush camp: King George whiting, grilled halloumi, salads and South Australian wine. The afternoon is at Seal Bay, on a private tour into the Australian sea-lion colony. Australian sea lions were listed Endangered under the EPBC Act in December 2020, fewer than 12,000 remain, and Seal Bay holds the third largest colony. They breed on a 17 to 18 month cycle rather than annually, which is unique among seals and means pups of several ages are on the beach at once: pups nursing, young males practising, bulls holding ground. Overnight: Mercure Kangaroo Island Lodge, American River. Meals: breakfast, morning tea, lunch.

Following breakfast, begin at a private wildlife refuge on the boundary of Flinders Chase National Park (a focal point for post-fire monitoring of wildlife recovery), where camera-trap surveys target tiny endangered mammals. Continue into the national park to learn how the bush has adapted to fire, then on to the southwest peninsula and Cape du Couedic. An elegant picnic lunch in the bush is followed by visits to Remarkable Rocks, perched impossibly on a granite dome, and Admirals Arch, where long-nosed fur seals haul out beneath the Southern Ocean swell. Overnight: American River. Meals: B/L.

Enjoy breakfast before a drive to the D'Estrees Bay region to meet a local entomologist working to save the endangered green carpenter bee. Continue south to Point Tinline, where an osprey nest first sketched by a crew member of the shipwrecked Osmanli in 1853 has been in regular use ever since. A clifftop picnic lunch is followed by a coastal hike along Cape Gantheaume Conservation Park, with chances of western whipbird, shy heathwren, southern emu-wren and long-nosed fur seal. The marine lagoon at Wheaton's Beach often holds red-necked stint, ruddy turnstone and the resident hooded plover. Overnight: American River. Meals: B/L.

After a final breakfast, meet at the hotel reception t for the group transfer to Kingscote Airport in time for onward flights. Meals: B.