16th April - Cape Naturaliste
Before heading out for the day, I did a short pre-breakfast walk around Busselton and found a nice Buff-banded Rail amongst other things.
A short distance south of Busselton is the Leeuwin-Naturaliste NP covering a 100 mile stretch of coast between 2 capes in the SW of Australia. Today we visited the northern of these two capes, partly by visiting various vehicle accessible viewpoints and partly by walking some of the trails.
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In 1801, the French navigator Nicolas Baudin stopped in this area during his expedition to map the coast of New Holland (Australia). He named the bay in which Busselton is "Geographe Bay", after his flagship, Géographe. Later, the cape was named after the expedition's second ship, Naturaliste. Baudin also gave his name to the Long-billed Black-cockatoo, which is now more usually referred to as Baudin's Black-cockatoo - we found a small flock of these on our drive back from canal rocks.