Tag Archives: Australia

Prolific

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Lorikeets are always looking for love and taking care of each other.

In Australia we saw a few here and there.  Maybe three or four in a tree.  They seem to always be paired up.

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Then we hit the motherload at a campground in Queensland.  They had a feeding station and it was total mayhem!

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What was a few in the trees chatting to one another turned into at least 30 in an instant.  They came from thick bush and tall eucalyptus trees.  Zipping by our heads to get their beaks on a bit of soaked bread.

Later that week, in another town, we heard the same commotion as we exited a grocery store at dusk.  In the trees around the parking lot there were around a hundred lorikeets.

These fellas really are prolific.

WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge – Prolific

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Awakening

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If it’s not the cocks then it’s the cats.

 

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Hero,  waiting for the Let-er-iner

When I think of this week’s WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge, Awakening, I hear the roosters.

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Traveling the world housesitting along with petsitting has involved dogs, cats and chickens.   But sometimes it’s not even the ones we’re watching announcing that morning has arrived or rather, about to arrive.  Those chooks could use a new watch.  At 3am the sun is NOT about to come up.

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As for the cats.  I’ve always attracted cats.  We have one and I am the feeder, the let-er-outer and the..well just repeat those titles as many times in the day as you can.

In Australia we met a cat I mentioned him in another post titled Happenstance.   His name is Patrick, he was an old male that had the power to startle a middle-aged heavily snoring male straight out of bed wondering and saying “what the hell was that?”.   He has since passed on but I won’t soon forget his roar.

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I’ve been using these weekly challenges to push me to write.  Thanks again,

WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge .

Notable Aussie Flashback

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Time to download the last of my Australian notes of interest.  These are random so don’t look for any rhyme or reason to them.  We are countries away form Australia now but I needed to get this out of my head. DSC01585

  1.    Chicken cone: A large plastic cone that attaches to the butcher table.  A chicken (Chook) is placed on it by inserting the cone up the butt of the bird (bird is dead, plucked and gutted. Sorry if you thought otherwise there for a second).  The cone spins so the bird spins too!  James, the butcher I staged with, said some folks use them and can cut up a chicken pretty fast.  I can’t help but think of beer can chicken.
  2. Camp-trailers: and off-road trailers for the overland folks.  The Aussies sure have a lot to choose from. pioneercampers.com, ultimate off-road campers, all with kitchens, awnings (big in AU due to the sun beating you down), and a hell of a lot of staking down.  These people are masters of the tie-down.
  3. I met a man named Max: at Rainbow Beach.  He is retired and fishing a lot.  He must have had seven rods all set up.  It reminds me of my Dad.  Max was using his “tinny” small tin boat to chase tannies and flatheads.  He let me have a look at a fishing magazine to explain what the hell those were.  He said the fishing was off due to a large seaweed mass that had moved into the area.  Said it hasn’t happened in about 150 years.  He jokingly blamed our current president letting me know that he knew my funny talk was American.
  4. Australian English: #homeofthebundy almost all the names for things here are shortened and have a “y” attached to the end.  Bari is Barumundi (I know that isn’t a “y” but that is what I remembered just know.)
  5. 1770: Where Captain Cook landed.   The only place in the world to have a number as a name Coocoo Buros with mud nests in the crouch of a tree, Scrub turkeys (aka Bush turkeys), empty beach for miles
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    Oakley 1770

    and sea turtles seen from cliffs above. Oh and glow in the dark spiders.

  6. The hand break is on the wrong side!  In both the car and on the bikes.  When riding here you must remember the rear brake is on the left and the front on the right.  Just another trick you need to pay attention to unless you plan on doing some indos.
  7. The Australian Magpie: DSC01041has a call (one of many) that is the same as the alien communication in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kindhttp://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075860/. Pretty sure that is where they got it from. Steven Spielberg not the birds. I need to watch that movie again. Some have said my Dad looks like Richard Dreyfus and I would agree.
  8. The 1912Queenslander: we stayed in is a style of house built on stilts to allow airflow to cool it.  We thought Brisbane was set up on a flood plane.  Nope.
  9. Birds: The Bush Stone-curlew, the Watercock, and the Australian White Ibis.  Ibis is a nuisance seen below, upper right.  Watercock looks like a chicken and an duck cross.

    Bush Turkey always seemed to be around.

    I don’t have a photo of the Bush Stone as he was quite elusive.  There are so many more.

Changing Pace

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Dear internet,

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An Aussie Magpie (They about as big as a fryer chicken and not to be messed with)

It has come to my attention that my dream of being able to write at a pace that would keep up with amount of data I am taking in is both overwhelming and impossible.

My brain works on stories and tries to tie things together.  I tend to sit on a story for a long time.  Remember when I told you I once spent two years working on a chuck box and most of that was planning?  Well, I caught myself trying to write stories in my head with out actually writing anything.  This way of thinking has turned my thoughts into a jumbled mess.

In the past 60 days of traveling I have not written nearly enough.  I need to be getting more out of my head.  Thus, I have decided to change the way my blog works for me.

This blog is for the folks interested in following our journey through my eyes and folks wanting to know what it may be like to travel the world with wife and kids.  I have discovered it needs to be for me first and foremost because my memory is crap.

I have notebooks of what I see, hear, and experience on our travels.  These notes are not pretty.  They don’t say more than a few words about a topic or subject.  I wouldn’t want anyone to try to decipher what I had jotted down in the back of a bouncing car.  Future blog posts will contain some of these ramblings.

Please think of this as more of a journal from now on or until I change my mind again.  The information I’m trying to hold on to is too great.  If I don’t log it, it will escape me.

This is still my photos and all that.  I’m just looking to increase the posted information.  I may, from time to time, surprise you with longer stories with more depth.

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The Australian Magpie is known for “swooping” during the spring breeding season.  so mush so that the cyclist wear helmets with zip ties sticking out all over.  This technique makes you look like a porcupine head.

I first thought the young cyclist had forgotten to remove the decorations from her helmet since a recent parade.  Not so.  Apparently, the Magpies will swoop so mush so that there are signs up in parks warning folks that this is a thing and that the damage can be pretty horrible.  Loss of eye and or cuts on head and ears happen quite frequently.  In other words they are total ***holes.

But wait, there’s more.  The Magpies have friends called Butcher Birds.  Smaller and slightly different in coloring.  Both are black and white but the Butcher has a full white apron.  Butchers also like to swoop.  (Well there’s another sentence that I didn’t know I would write.)

We lucked out and didn’t have any issues and survived the spring.  Back home I think this would be called a “hunting season” but the Magpie is a protected bird in Australia.  In that case there should be free helmet or umbrella (they work to protect you as well)  stands all around.

Tails Down Under

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ITINERARY: Hervey Bay to Platypus Bay, zip by Fraser Island and back to Hervey Bay.

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Hervey Bay plays with your eyes in the morning as the horizon and smooth ocean bay are almost indistinguishable.  A closer look reveals activity in what looks like total serenity.

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Untracked beach is disturbed by the artwork of what was explained to me as a worm.  In Oregon we can identify  disruption of the wet sand as clams but here it’s worms used as bait.  As the worm digs in deeper perfect balls of sand lay on the beach like little marbles.

 

 

 

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Canyon (furthest out. Surprise, surprise) and Oakley. 

 

Kids play in the shallow bay were you can be a hundred yards into the ocean and still only be thigh high.

 

 

 

 

As I had mentioned in the itinerary above we did head out on a whale watching tour by the Pacific Whale Foundation.  The show that followed hit all the highlights in the brochure.

We witnessed blowing, head slap, fluke up dive, pec slap, breach, tail slap, peduncle throw, and singing.   Although, all these behaviors could be found in a Gurr Boy wrestling match we saw them preformed by slightly higher weight class. The adults weigh in at about 35 tons!

The pics I’ve placed here are just a handful of the amount I shot.  I’m still patting myself on the back for deciding to upgrade to the Sony A6000 mirrorless camera before leaving the States.

I could here my father telling me about shooting photographs of a moving subject from a boat (moving object) as being extremely difficult.  Add to that not knowing where the subject will appear and you get about a thousand shots to sort through.  Blurry, delete, late, delete, I moved, delete, early not there yet, delete….

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KGURR PHOTO

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That were still playing as the sun when low and we had to head back.

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The route back to the dock took us within a few boat lengths of Fraser Island.  An adventure that I felt was priced out of the budget for this go around.  I have seen in before on a whim in 2001.  I swear to return to it someday.

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