Coffin Bay National Park, Southern Eyre Peninsular

Port Lincoln Parrot

The town of Coffin Bay lies to the west of Port Lincoln and is more or less at the eastern extremity of the Great Australian Bight, that huge bay which sits at the southern end of the continent and stretches west 1500 miles to Esperance.

Adjacent to the town is a National Park with the same name, a place of wild seascapes, huge sand dunes and mile after mile of mallee scrub, a place where emus and kangaroos run alongside the vehicle and where dolphins, whales and great white sharks can be seen offshore. A truly fabulous and exhilarating place, seemingly on the edge of the world.

Emus are a common sight in the national park.

Port Lincoln Parrot is a race of Australian ringneck and is pretty common in this area.

Singing honeyeaters are everywhere, and were the source of most of the song from the scrub.

Offshore crested tern is the common tern, in fact apart from a few Australian gannets and the occasional cormorant or silver gull, these were the only birds seen at sea.

Adult and 2nd calendar year Pacific gulls.

The highlight of the day was something which I couldn't photograph, 15 bottle-nosed dolphins swimming in the surf and as the waves broke, leaping out of the water and back into the sea and seemingly waiting for the next wave.

Amazing to think, if you travel in roughly that direction over the sea, it will be 1500 miles before you next hit land and when you do, it's still the same country just the other side of the bay known as the Great Australian Bight.

Coffin Bay is world renowned for it's oysters and it seemed a fitting end to the day with a visit to the 1802 Oyster Bar on the edge of the town.