Tuesday & Wednesday brought some exciting weather including gale force winds & torrential rain for much of the time. The wind at night was ferocious & loud bringing down lots of branches & sadly some birds. It's a bit unpleasant finding dead birds beside the path & also some noddies trapped in Pisonia seeds which stick to their feathers & render them unable to escape so they just starve to death. It's life & death in the wild but quite distressing to see up close!
We witnessed another sad fact of nature when we were lucky enough to see a couple of turtle hatchlings make it to the water but they were trapped by low tide rocks & unable to make the open ocean. Despite encouragement from a small group of us they were taken by seagulls in the end. Turtles that are born on Heron Island actually come back here about 30 years later to mate & lay their thousands of eggs but very few of those hatchlings actually survive - 1 in 1000
The bad weather caused the cancellation of the daily boat connection to Gladstone which left quite a few people stranded for a couple of extra days & no new arrivals. There was a surprisingly resigned attitude from everyone we chatted to & the mood on the island became much more communal & festive ...... castaways on a sub-tropical island in the cold - not what we had expected in Queensland.