Mar 15, Phillip Island

We drove down around the east side of Western Port Bay to Phillips Island. It's a fairly commercial tourist area, with mini golf and vacation cottages, hotels and lots of caravan parks. There are a couple of things we want to see here, the Koala Conservation Centre and the Penguin Parade. It was cheaper to buy a ticket for those that included the Churchill Island Heritage Farm, so we did.
The Heritage Farm had a nineteenth century farmhouse. That featured nine rooms, but was laid out so that some rooms could only be accessed by going outside to another door. It had lovely gardens; kitchen, cottage and herb. There were farm animals and they did sheep shearing, cow milking and so on there. There were a couple of ferrets in a cage and they explained that the farmers put the ferrets down rabbit holes to flush out the rabbits. Rabbits are a big pest here.

After lunch we went to the Koala Conservation Centre. It was a natural koala habitat, but so many were being killed by cars on the nearby road, that they built fences to keep the koalas protected. In a small part of that they built board walks that go up into the eucalyptus trees, so we could see koala sleeping high in the trees. It was very exciting to see them in their habitat.

Tonight we went to see the Penquin Parade. Every day the Little Penquins, just 13" high, go out to sea to eat and every evening at dusk, they come back to their nests. That's the parade. It's quite an operation. There's a long boardwalk over the penquin burrows to the beach where there are bleachers set up. And there were lights on the beach itself. Tonight the crowd was small, about 800, compared to the 3,000 maximum. So we all waited till dark. A little before 8 one little penquin waddled out of the water and went quickly across the sand to the areas where the burrows were. Several minutes later a little group of penquins gathered at the edge of the water, started across the beach, got scared and ran back into the sea. We could just make out dark shapes as they came out of the water, then when they stood up, we could see their white bellies easily. They got back together again, waited for more penquins to join them and then scooted to the burrows. This happened again and again at several spots along the beach. After about 50 minutes we walked back up the boardwalk and there were multitudes of penquins there. We could see babies that had come out of the burrows to meet the parents and get food from them and we could see the groups of well fed penquins waddling up to the burrows. Who knew there were penquins in Australia?
One of the prohibitions with the penquins was no photography, the flash hurts their eyes. This picture came from a postcard.