Just before heading out of Karballi and up north to Shark Bay, we stopped down to the beach for the regular morning ritual, Pelican feeding. The locals take turns volunteering to feed the pelicans, and it's so much more than just feeding. They give a complete lecturette for 30 minutes before the feeding frenzy begins. The elder woman volunteer, all decked out in her ozzie hat and beach gear, with a smile larger than life itself asks the crowd to gather round. She talks of the days an old fisherman had begun feeding the pelicans years ago, and how when he was ill, and couldn't make it to the park, the pelicans would walk over to his front yard looking for fish. Well, the old fisherman has since passed away, but they still carry on the tradition. These are no ordinary pelican, they are native to Australia, and migrate each year to New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, always coming back to Australia to mate. She spoke gingerly of the mating process, the male pelicans strutting around behind the female, trying to outdo the others. Eventually she selects one, usually the most aggressive (indicating that this aggressive male would most likely do a good job protecting their offspring), turns around and indicates to the chosen one, who stays on, and the others go away disgruntled, making loud noises. The female pelican, whose beak is now hot pink with a bright blue line through it, mates about a week later with the male, and they get their spot in the sand all prepped for the egg laying. Once the baby incubates and hatches, the feeding process is most interesting- the baby's go all the way down the mother and father pelican's throat and eat up the regurgitated food, then hop back out. They do this for nearly 9 months, until they're far too big to make it all the way down, and they are taught to fend for themselves, fishing with the lot of others.
Enough of the Pelican story... Part of this blog is to also educate our nephews and niece (Berg family) :-) We think the pictures turned out really cool. The birds were really friendly and walked right up to us.
The rest of the day we spent driving up to Shark Bay, north of Karballi. Some cool sights were had - despite the fact that it was 42+ degrees celsius (in the 100's Fahrenheit) and felt like we were in a hot furnace when we got out to treck to the sites to get the photos. First really cool site was the Hamelin Pools just as you enter Shark Bay peninsula. It's a marine reserve containing the world's best know colony of stromatolites which are microbes, nearly identical to organisms that lived 1900 million years ago, and eventually evolved into a more complex life. They've established a viewing platform that you walk out on a wood pier like structure over the crystal clear blue/green water, and you can look down to see the little stumps of brown organisms growing up from the ocean floor. We'll post this picture in the Australia photos section (although you'll note that there are no titles on any of the pictures, as the software we're using at the moment strips off all the titles and comments we've put in).
Another very unique spot we ventured out into the flaming inferno to see was shell beach. It was low tide, and the water had slipped out the length of several football fields, leaving behind a white beach of tiny shells drying in the sun.
We finally reached Denham, the entry way into Shark Bay, and our stopping off point before heading out to Monkey Mia to see the dolphins the next morning.
