Willy Wagtail, the "gossip" bird of one of the Aborigine creation legends
Another view of Willy
Kata Tjuta or "The Olgas"
The originally horizontal layers at Kata Tjuta are tilted at about 15 degrees
The entrance to Olga Gorge
View from Olga Gorge looking back at the sandstone plain
The Walpa GorgeKata Tjuta is about a 30-minute drive from Uluru and "consists of conglomerate, composed mainly of very large 'clasts' -- pebbles, cobbles and boulders that are recognisable as pieces of rock, rather than being single mineral grains. The main types of rock are granite and basalt, but there are also a few boulders of sandstone and rhyolite in the lower conglomerate beds, and several kinds of metamorphick rocks throughout." (Uluru & Kata Tjuta: A geological history, I.P. Sweet & I.H. Crick, Geoscience Australia, 2003)
It was at the approach to Kata Tjuta that we saw the red and gray-blue kangaroos, and the Willy Wagtail.
2 comments:
Poor old willly, there seems very little for him to eat. Apparently they eat small creatures, mostly, so perhaps those flies that bothered you in the evenings were what sustained him. What kind of flies were they (broad categories here: did they bite? how big were they? and what the heck do they eat in such a harsh environment?)
Willy must be surviving on small insects but I doubt that the flies that afflicted us were part of his diet. The flies were quite small, about half the size of the common American housefly, and did not bite (us). I did squash a few of the more annoying ones, and only one of them appeared to have had a recent blood meal that stained my knuckle. I have no idea what they eat; perhaps they prey on wild kangaroos and wild camels. We were told that there are several hundred thousand wild camels in the Outback and that they are increasing at an alarming rate. Camels are particularly well adapted to the arid conditions of the Outback, and there is more scrub shrubbery and trees than I anticipated. It does rain in the Outback, which accounts for the evident erosion of Uluru and Kata Tjuta, and there are a number of springs and water holes.
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