The walk from Five Fingers Reef, through Coral Bay, to the headland north of Shark Lagoon is about 15km but well worth the effort, with turquoise seas and fine white sand beaches at the base of large sand dunes, the scenery is just stunning. Terns dominate here and during our stay I managed to see eight different species of tern of varying shapes and sizes as you can see from this photo!
And here's three species for a start, Caspian, crested, lesser crested and common terns. Note that the common terns are of the eastern race longipennis which have black bills in both breeding and non-breeding plumage unlike the red bills with a black tip that we are more familiar with in Western Europe.
Lesser crested tern was a new species for me and I saw about 80 today. Considerably smaller than crested tern, they also have an orange bill rather than the greenish bill of their larger cousin.
Crested tern and lesser crested tern.
Lesser crested and roseate terns.
Lesser crested, common and roseate terns.
A brown noddy was in amongst the roosting terns. The only other place I have seen this species is Michaelmas Cay on the Great Barrier Reef. Also today there was a bridled tern.
Mainly roseate terns with a few commons and lesser crested.
Mainly roseate, common and lesser crested terns, however if you look closely you can pick out a white-winged black tern.
White-winged black tern near the left in this photo.
White-winged black tern.
Roseate, lesser crested, white-winged black and common tern. There were about six white-winged black terns on the beach. This is a species which I saw previously during my time at Werribee near Melbourne last year, when they were in amongst the huge flocks of whiskered terns.
Impressive numbers of roseate terns.
There were a handful of waders on the beach, including one of my favourites, red-capped plover.
Sanderling
Greater sand plover.
Grey-tailed tattler. Other waders today included great knot and common sandpiper.
Coral Bay
Shark Lagoon.
Reef sharks at Coral Bay.
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