Norah Head

Visited: Autumn

Recommendation: The area around Norah Head and south to Soliders Beach is wonderful to explore. The long sandy beaches have many shorebirds, terns and cormorants to find, while the trails through the bush give up bronzewing, honeyeater and thornbills. It gets even better at night with snakes, possums and echidna. 

Norah Head is a headland north of Long Jetty and The Entrance and is famed for having a pristine, restored and working lighthouse. The views are fabulous and the lighthouse is a tourist attraction and guest house now. At the bottom of the headland, you can walk along the beach south to Soldiers Point. Although it is obviously a popular place for locals and tourists to visit, we did not find it overcrowded on the number of occasions we visited. 

Our first visit here netted us a very loud and territorial Little Wattlebird. Turned out there are a lot of them in the area, possibly why this one was warning everyone else off his tree. Close to the car park where this bird was, we found a nature trail through the forest and we stumbled across a beautifully healthy looking echidna. No time for a photo, it was off but we were thrilled anyway.

It is nice to see more corvids in the area. Torresian Crow, Little Raven and Australian Raven are all present here and telling them apart can be tricky. I have learned a trick to distinguish the crow from the raven and that is: crows 'caw' and ravens 'awww'. The drawl of the raven gives it away. They also have thick hackles under the chin, as seen below. I am still working on the Little Raven. 

Across the road on the sea side of the road is a more scrubby area, with some open patches of ground. It was here that we found the most incredibly marked Carpet Python, just going about its business. It was very shy of us but we sat on the ground close by and it slithered past heading for the sunshine. 

Norah Head at night was very different to the day. The lighthouse was functional and we spent quite some time watching it rotate. It was a full moon and the combination of the 2 lighting up the sea was quite something. Photography was challenging but we tried nonetheless. The track where we had previously seen an echidna was very quiet but the reserve at the bottom of the hill more productive. 

The star of the show was a Golden-crowned Snake that we only saw because someone was sitting on the road photographing it. This is a realtively small brown snake but had a very attractive pale crown. We stopped several cars to ensure its safety and one guy jumped out to join us looking at it. He was experienced with handling snakes and picked it up with the end of an umbrella and escorted it, hissing away to safety.  

On another visit to the head, we ventured down onto the beach and along to the next rocky area. There we found some waders who had not yet departed for their breeding grounds in the Northern Hemisphere. A good find was the Double-banded Plover, a native bird of New Zealand and occasional visitor to south east Australia.