The Day of Many Crabs

I have been outside photographing birds so often over the past week that we now run into strangers on trails who recognize me and ask how the photos came out. But it’s been a fun endeavor, and the golden bosuns were finally cooperative today, even though they still made me work for the photos, at one point hovering near some cliffs for several minutes only to start soaring overhead again once I had run down a few dozen stairs to the cliff’s edge. Thankfully, in the end we came to an agreement and I walked away with a few nice shots.

After starting the day photographing birds on my own for a few hours, I came back to pick up Audrey – she insists that when you’re on a tropical island you should have time to lounge, which I disagree with vehemently – and we headed off to the police station to borrow a locator beacon. We later realized that the island is much smaller than we thought, so we might have been overcautious in carrying a beacon when you could probably walk across the entire island in half a day, but with very limited cell coverage (calls work in town, but no data anywhere), and roads that sometimes rattle the car so much that you’re still shaking when the drive ends, it didn’t hurt to have an extra safety device along for the ride.

Our destination for the day was an area on the far side of the island called the Dales, so named for tiny freshwater trickles that flow through the area, and which we chose due to its variety of crabs. The red crabs, whose annual migration make the island famous, are everywhere, as are the giant robber crabs (albeit in much smaller numbers), but this area is also home to blue crabs, or “Luigis” as Nadine at the visitor center named them for their mustache markings. Between the huge spiders that we again encountered and the many, many crabs scuttling about in the jungle, Audrey spent the hike very much in her happy place.

The trail was reasonably easy to follow until its end, where Nadine had told us “just follow the water downhill and climb over the rocks, there’s no markings”. After bushwhacking over jagged rock, repeatedly crossing the small creek, and pushing our way through the jungle, we eventually got to a dropoff into a small gorge with a sign at its head containing numerous warnings about the terrain ahead, including (ironically) an admonition to “stay on the marked trail”; it is fair to say that anyone reading that warning had long ago decided to do exactly the opposite.

We’ve got a half day remaining here tomorrow before our flight departs, and while I’ve chosen Tasmania as the place I would move to if I had to leave the USA, Audrey has decided that we’ll need to split our time between Tassie and Christmas Island. It’s been a good week.