The second day in Fiji, I planned to take a bus out to Kula Eco Park in between Nadi and Fiji's capital city of Suva. The park apparently houses several species of native birds which, due to habitat loss and the introduction of mongoose from India in the early 20th century, have severely decreased in number. Many ground dwelling native species endemic to Fiji have been lost due to mongooses and rats - which eat their eggs. Many of these birds are now confined only to those few islands in Fiji which do not have mongoose.
The most interesting part of the trip out to the park was again the entertainment on the bus ride. On the first bus, I heard an indignant DJ (a woman) relate an "interest story" of a Fijian woman who had recently "set a world record" by becoming a grandmother at 23. She had given birth to her daughter at 12, and her daughter gave birth at age 11. The DJ finished the story with a snide "I don't whether to be shocked or to say congratulations." Now, leaving aside for a moment the question of whether this was actually a record, and even ignoring the woman's condescending tone, I was most interested in what came next. Here are the lyrics to the first song that the DJ queued up:
I'm going to bing bang-bang your body, oh
Going to rough you up before we take it slow
Girl, let me rock you, rock you like a rodeo.
I want to make your body surrender to mine
Because you're one of a kind.
Um, does anyone else see the irony in this?
The next bus ride had non-stop episodes of Mr. Bean. So I was about ready to shoot myself upon reaching the park.
The park itself was lovely. A small area of preserved forest which housed a selection of birds, lizards, and snakes.
While it felt a bit like cheating to birdwatch enclosed birds, there were definitely some species there that would be extremely difficult to see in the wild. I found this out the next day.
After leaving the Eco Park, I caught a bus to Suva. I'll write more about the Suva experience in my next entry. Upon reaching Suva I almost immediately caught a cab up to the Raintree Lodge, a backpacker's hostel a little way out of the city in the rainforest. It was known for it's quiet beauty, as well as its birdwatching. In the morning, I awoke early and grabbed my binoculars, and headed out to the forest path. It turned out that the path, while nice enough, was quite narrow and didn't really afford areas to view up through the canopy, and so made visibility difficult. I walked a little ways down this path, with my main sighting being a black masked shining parrot, a relatively rare bird! However, besides the parrot, all I saw were a few unidentifable, to me, small chickadee-like birds. Of course, walking back, almost having reached the lodge, I ran into the park ranger, a Fijian man named Vindo, who knew birds. He told me that the trail I had chosen wasn't the best place to go. He said he would be available to take me out the next day, but I needed to be on a plane to Auckland, so I had to decline. Birding in Fiji probably could have been better, but I still enjoyed getting out into the rainforest, seeing the birds I did see, and enjoying the process of puzzling out the birds I couldn't readily identify.
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