Meet Percival. Percival is a pelican (hopefully you've already seen that) and was the star attraction of the pelican feeding show we saw Monday morning in Kalbarri. The local pelicans are given fish around 8:45 every morning, and this particular morning Percival was the only male to turn up, and evidently very hungry as he pushed all the females, and a few little kids, around in his quest to get as many fish as possible down his gullet. Don't let his unassuming demeanor fool you, Percival is one nasty bird.
After watching the pelican feeding, we had to get back to the main highway, which meant passing once again through Kalbarri NP, where we stopped at another lookout point. From there it was around a 5 hour drive up to Shark Bay, which, rather than a single town, is actually a huge region consisting of several peninsulas, bays, and inlets that has been designated a World Heritage Site, meaning that it meets preservation criteria for having special cultural, historical, natural, and scientific properties. Other than being an important site for early settlers and scientists, Shark Bay is also home to some really cool organisms, perhaps none cooler than the stromatolites, which were our first stop.
The stromatolites are behind me in the background. Don't look like much, but what they actually are is a living fossil, basically the same thing that was the first life on earth 3.5 billion years ago. A stromatolite is a rock formation that's made by cyanobacteria, tiny organisms that can only survive in very harsh conditions - in this case, the hypersaline waters of Hamelin Pool, tucked into the southeast corner of the Shark Bay region. As the cyanobacteria colonies grow, they produce little bits of mineral leachings that form the stromatolites, but also tiny bubbles of oxygen - which was what first formed our atmosphere and allowed other life to evolve. I think that's pretty cool.
Just a little ways down the road from Hamelin Pool was Shell Beach. Unlike most beaches which are made of sand, Shell Beach is composed entirely - yep, you guessed it - of shells. They're actually all shells from one type of tiny snail that can survive in the super-salty water, and they've been accumulating for a long time, so that in some places they go down almost 20 feet. The shells also form a big shelf that stretches way far out into the ocean. The picture above looks like it's taken just offshore, but I was almost 1/3 of a mile out into the water.
After Shell Beach, we made our way into Denham, the only real town of the Shark Bay area, and checked into the Blue Dolphin Caravan Park where we finally got to set up our tent, which mercifully was really easy to do but which, for whatever reason, seemed to make Noam angry:
We finished setting up the tent around 3:30, then headed out into Francois Peron National Park. This park covers the majority of the peninsula on which Denham is located, and is named after a French zoologist who explored the area heavily back in the day. The land it's on was once a popular area for sheep stations, but it's now ground zero for Project Eden, which focuses on the restoration of native species including mallee fowl (a ground nesting bird) and the bilby (which is my favorite marsupial just because I think they look awesome; a picture of them is here). Unfortunately we didn't see any bilbies, but we did get to check out the Peron homestead, an old sheep station that's been preserved as a museum to bush ranching. The homestead is also home to a century-old "artesian" hot tub, which uses a windmill to pump up groundwater, then heats it and dumps it in a big metal tank. I wasn't expecting it to be anything more than lukewarm, so I was very surprised when I stepped in and the water was near-boiling; it took some time to adjust! No pictures, unfortunately.
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