Category: Wildlife
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In the gutter
Recently I’ve been more vigilant about scheduling things into my calendar in order to Get Things Done, and have been including regular maintenance-type tasks like cleaning the gutters as a monthly event. Our house is surrounded by eucalyptus trees constantly shedding leaves and bark, and if the gutters clog up, we either don’t gather much…
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Well-behaved ducklings
On a recent visit to Mum’s Daintree property, we spent some time in the afternoon sitting in the bird hide next to the main wetland watching the radjah shelducks go about their business. One of them stood guard, standing on the edge of the water looking outwards, while the ducklings stayed hidden in some reeds.…
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Up north
Some scattered memories from our recent holiday: Edward and I left a chilly winter morning in Brisbane, and arrived to warm sunny weather in Cairns. Mum picked us up from Cairns airport in a borrowed car. “The air conditioning doesn’t work,” she said. “I mean, you can test it, but I turned it on and…
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In zid
Things I’m loving about New Zealand: – the amount of farmland, and the sheer number of sheep I have seen grazing in fields, in the snow, and on seemingly sheer mountainsides. I love sheep. I am going to move here and run a sheep farm. With other people doing all the hard work – I’ll…
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Long weekends
We stayed in Stanthorpe over the long weekend, and did a walk in Girraween National Park to Castle Rock – it’s about a 5k return walk, with the most fantastic views up at the top of the rock. It was overcast and freezing, as we were trying to fit our walk before the forecast rain,…
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Scritch, scratch
Last night I was sitting at my laptop, while ostensibly supervising some spaghetti cooking on the stove (my last two attempts at cooking gluten free spaghetti had resulted in nasty sludgey texture, so I was trying to take more care with the cooking process this time) when I heard the possum that lives in the…
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Bees
A hive of bees – or what looked to me like a hive of bees – have been collecting pollen from the blossoms in one of the palms for the past week, thrumming away as we walked somewhat warily underneath them each day. I have been wondering what their honey will taste like. I suppose…
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Wings
These Top 14 Astronomy Pictures from 2010 are incredible – I particularly like shots of the moons of Saturn, and the dunes of Mars. A couple of very thought provoking posts about intellectual property. I really liked this post by Flinthart about lifelong learning. A couple of interesting videos from TED – Brene Brown’s talk…
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To the other side
We were driving home the other night, puttering along watching out for water over the road, and we stopped for a koala – the first I have seen in the wild that hasn’t been an unmoving lump in a high tree. It was pacing across the road and paused as we slowed and stopped, staring…
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Camping
The weather was a little damp for camping this weekend, but we still had a lot of fun. I found a bees’ nest. And jammed on the ukulele. And read Ellen Kushner’s The Privilege of the Sword. And when we got home, we found the biggest group of king parrots we’ve seen feeding on some…
o frabjous day! 