Monkey Mia

Cape Peron

Skipjack Point

This wedge-tailed eagle did not want to get off the road!

We were excited about meeting the dolphins on the foreshore this morning. Wild dolphins (Indo-Pacific bottlenose)have been coming to Monkey Mia to accept fish for more than 40 years. Today the feeding is a lot more controlled by rangers. Between 8am and 12pm, 4 wild female dolphins and their young come to the beach where they can be fed up to 3 times a day. This is just a quarter of their daily food intake so that they don't rely on humans for food. Young dolphins are not fed at all so that they learn to forage for themselves. Two of the dolphins had young calves which were only three weeks old - they were very playful and starting to gain confidence. The feeding sessions are kept short because the very young calves suckle every ten minutes which they have to do in deeper water. They are such gorgeous creatures. There were nearly 100 people on the foreshore and when it comes to feeding volunteers are selected from the crowd to hand out a fish. Caitlin & Cooper got chosen but I was in trouble because I had walked up the other end with the camera and didn't even see them - woops! We stayed for the next two feeding sessions which were a lot less crowded. Caitlin was chosen again so I managed to get a photo this time. We then jumped in the car and drove out to Francois Peron N.P. which requires a 4WD for the very red, sandy tracks. Our first stop was the Peron Homestead which was a working sheep station in the 1950s. We continued on to Cape Peron and a had a picnic lunch before doing a short walk along the cliff edge. Project Eden is a wildlife protection
project aimed at eradicating feral animals such as foxes, goats and cats and reintroducing native species such as mallee fowl, bilbies, echidna, woylie etc. A 3.4km exclusion fence was
erected along the narrowest part of the peninsula to keep out feral animals. At Skipjack Point we saw heaps of marine life from the viewing platform including manta rays, eagle rays, sharks, bull ray, turtles and trevally - it was great. On the way out we stopped for a look at the Big Lagoon. The parks was named after the French zoologist, Francois Peron, who arrived in Shark Bay in 1801 under Captain Baudin.