All Koala'd Up on Raymond Island

One of the things we really wanted to see on a recent road trip down the coast to Eden, Bairnsdale and Phillip Island was a koala or two. Not those in zoos, but koalas in the 'wild'. To this end we headed for Paynesville and Raymond Island, a 20 minute drive from Bairnsdale, in the Gippsland Lakes area. 

Getting to the island was fun - just find a parking spot somewhere along the shoreline strip in Paynesville, then hop on the ferry that crosses every 20 mins or so to the island - it's free for foot traffic. The island has a good population of koalas - most of whom have been translocated from other places (such as Phillip Island), due to over-population, loss of habitat and over-development. 

Apart from the short but peaceful ride across the straights on the punt (it's like a giant version of the Putney punt here in Sydney), spotting koalas is not as hard as I expected it might be. For a start, the local council has set up a koala trail, making it easy to take a walking tour around the best koala viewing spots. I guess the trail is around a kilometre or two of easy sandy paths among the manna gums favoured by the little bears (not actually bears). Another bonus is that these trees are not really high - we were expecting to be craning our necks looking for koalas in 50-foot trees. Most are around 15 - 25 foot high - a 300m lens was more than enough to fill the frame with pictures of these somnolent marsupials.

Pics by Natalie Hitchens

(Pic by Natalie Hitchens)

We counted 17 koalas along our 90 minute walk - I later read that there are a lot more dotted around the island. And while most of the ones we spotted were in a food coma snoozing, a few lifted their heads as we jostled to get the best angle - while trying to avoid the usual 'black blob' against an overexposed sky type of result I see a lot on the 'net. If I were to revisit this place, I'd probably use a flash to add a little fill light but as you can see here, the light wasn't contrasty so we were able to capture a lot of facial detail without losing features or much of the background colour.

Above left by Natalie Hitchens (right by Robin Nichols).

Besides koalas, Raymond Island is also host to a wide range of other mammals and bird species. We walked for a couple of hours and saw no kangaroos or wallabies but there were a lot of birds messing about in the dense shrubbery. You know the sort - LBJs (little brown jobs) that are very active and noisy - but only ever sit on the opposite side of a bush so, though you know they are there, you rarely get a glimpse of anything other than a sense of movement and a few bird calls.
However, one that I did recognise was a butcher bird - these birds are relatively common all over but what was special about this one was it was deconstructing a mouse that it had just caught. Like the proverbial leopard up a tree, this bird had the unfortunate mouse wedged in a fork of the bush and was feeding off it.

Tricky to capture in any photo because of the dense foliage, I was forced to use manual focus (MF) because, with so many branches between camera and the subject, my poor old Canon 5D MkIII didn't know where to focus! Tip for avid photographers: Most cameras, even relatively inexpensive models, have a feature called a variable focus point (or something similar). What this means is that you can set the camera to use different areas of the viewfinder with which to focus. For this very tricky subject I set my Canon to use single point focus - this is a single point measuring about 5% of the total area (it can be moved around the viewfinder, depending on where in the frame the subject sits) - even then it had great difficulty in determining which part of the scene to focus on - so I set it to MF mode and relied on my eyesight to focus on the right 'bit'. 10 pictures later, I got this, best of the bunch.

Pics by Natalie Hitchens.