Private Tour: Southern Eyre Peninsula Bird Watching

A 9am start from the Port Lincoln Hotel, and the first stop is five minutes away. Billy Lights Point sits on the fringe of coastal mallee above sheltered bays, which makes it an efficient first hour: cormorants, teal, oystercatchers and osprey on the water side; striated pardalote, western yellow robin, blue-breasted fairywren, white-browed babbler and rock parrot in the scrub behind. Then the bird hide at Tulka, where waders and seabirds come in over the shallows and the surrounding heath is one of the more reliable places on the lower peninsula for southern emu-wren. Into Lincoln National Park — roughly 29,000 ha of granite headland, coastal heath and dune, running from the Southern Ocean at Sleaford Bay round to the sheltered water of Spalding Cove. Sea-eagles and ospreys work the cliffs, kites and harriers the heath, and the mallee behind holds purple-gaped and spiny-cheeked honeyeaters, dusky woodswallow, blue-breasted fairywren and white-browed scrubwren, with malleefowl mounds the more likely find than the bird itself. Watch the track edges for Rosenberg’s goanna: fewer than several hundred survive in South Australia, about a hundred of them here, and a young one takes nine years to reach maturity. Stamford Hill carries the obelisk raised in about 1844 by Sir John Franklin, who had sailed with Flinders as a midshipman on the Investigator, on the spot where Flinders surveyed the gulf on 26 February 1802. An Australian-style picnic lunch, then Mikkira Station, a pastoral property taken up in 1842 by the Scottish settler Adam Borthwick. What brings people here now are the koalas, dozing in the manna gums at head height. They are not native to the Eyre Peninsula: six animals released here in 1969 founded a population that now occupies about 1,500 square kilometres of the southern peninsula. Emus and western grey kangaroos move through the old paddocks, and the eucalypts hold Port Lincoln parrots, black-faced cuckoo-shrikes, golden whistlers and the occasional scarlet robin.

A 7.30am departure north up the Spencer Gulf coast, and this is the day built around the tide. Second Creek, south of Tumby Bay, is a tidal estuary running into mangrove, with a 950m beach fronted by a hundred metres of sand and rock flats — the feeding ground for the shorebirds that spend the austral summer here. Ruddy turnstone is the one to look for: listed vulnerable under the EPBC Act in January 2024, breeding north of 60 degrees in the high Arctic, and recorded by geolocator making a round trip of about 27,000km, research first reported in Australian Geographic. Red-necked stints work the same flats and hooded plovers hold territories on the beaches. Inland, the country turns to farmland broken by conservation parks. Murrunatta holds remnant mallee and swamp paperbark over ground that floods regularly, and is known habitat for the Eyre Peninsula southern emu-wren; Wanilla is sugar gum woodland with a heath understorey over steep gullies. This is the country for yellow-tailed black-cockatoos, which are in trouble on the peninsula and depend on the old hollow-bearing trees, and for raptors: wedge-tailed and little eagles, brown falcon, brown goshawk, collared sparrowhawk and nankeen kestrel. The Tod River valley runs south from the reservoir built between 1918 and 1922, completed by pastoralist Sidney Kidman, and the scheme that ended Port Lincoln’s dependence on rainwater and three wells. The river country holds ducks, Australian boobook, red wattlebird, grey fantail, honeyeaters, and both southern scrub-robin and western yellow robin in the denser cover. Picnic lunch in the field. This is the loosest day of the three by design — the route depends on the tide, the wind and what the guide has been seeing that week. Overnight: Port Lincoln Hotel. Meals: B/L.

A 9am start west to Coffin Bay, named by Flinders on 16 February 1802 for Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin, who had overseen the fitting-out of the Investigator. The park was proclaimed in 1982 and runs to about 31,000ha across a peninsula of Pleistocene dune sand cemented into limestone and cut by the Southern Ocean into headlands, cliffs and long white beaches. Around 150 bird species are recorded across the Coffin Bay parks, and the designation as an Important Bird Area rests on more than one per cent of the world populations of pied and sooty oystercatchers. Active osprey nests sit on the cliffs, white-bellied sea-eagles fish along the sand, and the beaches hold Caspian and Australian fairy terns, hooded plovers, red-capped plovers, red-necked stints and masked lapwings. Point Avoid and Almonta Beach are on the sealed road; beyond Yangie Bay the park is four-wheel drive only. Lunch at Coffin Bay, then about an hour and a half on a working oyster lease with the grower. Coffin Bay has farmed oysters since Pacific spat was first trialled here in 1969; the native Angasi was given up on in 1937 for slow growth and high mortality, and the flat oyster reefs that once ran along 1,500km of South Australian coast are now entirely gone. Eyrelab and the University of Adelaide are working on restoring Angasi reef in the bay. Up to forty boats work these waters on a given day and around a hundred people are employed on the leases and in the sheds. The last stop is the bird hide at Big Swamp, a good place to finish a list: black swans, grey and chestnut teal, pink-eared duck, musk duck, black-winged stilt, banded lapwing, common greenshank and Cape Barren geese. Return to Port Lincoln, with airport transfer for afternoon flights to Adelaide. Meals: B/L.