Away with the birdos

I had an excellent morning excursion yesterday with the Cumberland Bird Observers' Club. We went to Crosslands Reserve, and during a three hour stroll I counted a very respectable 21 bird species.

I'm not entirely new to bird observing, but I am to the club, and appreciated leader Trevor's introductory talk, on field guides, binocular use, observer etiquette, and lots more.


Trevor has travelled the world pursuing his passion, and he knows his stuff.


We'd hardly started when somebody spotted a white-bellied sea eagle perched in a tree. Out came the binoculars and the 1000mm long lenses. (And out came my $150 Aldi camera too! It did a respectable job as ever.)

Two tawny frogmouths now. No way I'd have noticed them without the trained eyes of the old hands in the group. They look like bits of tree.

Ditto a Lewin's Honeyeater. The regulars had been hearing him and his friends for a while and recognising his call.




My day's 21-species list:
Australian Wood Duck, Noisy Miner, White-bellied Sea Eagle, White-faced Heron, Eastern Spinebill, Crimson Rosella, Australian Raven, Dusky Moorhen, Magpie-Lark, Lewin's Honeyeater, Golden Whistler, Australian Magpie, Grey Butcherbird, Masked Lapwing, Chestnut Teal, Tawny Frogmouth, Superb Lyrebird, Striated Thornbill, Brown Gerygone, Australian Brush-turkey, and Superb Fairy Wren.

20 years of no lilo

I was reminded the other day that I've been in Sydney for 20 years now. This was by way of a bushwalking trip down to the start of the Wollangambe Canyon at Mt Wilson in the Blue Mountains.

It was the same trip I'd done shortly after arriving here in early 1998. The really cool thing to do here is to take a lilo down to the river, and float down through the canyon for a few kilometres, then exit via another track.

On another occasion I'd set off  to do the lilo trip, but been talked out of it because of cool and inclement weather. It tends to be a bit cold in the water, even on hot summer days.

Anyway, a a nice little visit was had once again. The scenery is excellent. It's not a huge walk, but you do go down and up a few hundred metres, and some of my fellow walkers were somewhat tested on the uphill journey.

The start of the canyon proper.

A Flying Doormat

A few years ago I wrote about my bushwalking group's visit to the Flying Carpet, a spectacular rock platform that sticks out from half way up a cliff in the Gardens of Stone area. See here: Flying Carpet

Well the other day we visited a slightly smaller, slightly less spectacular rocky outcrop. We've named it the Flying Doormat.

It's in the Blue Mountains, and sticks out over the Grose River Valley. You get a superb vantage point to survey Mt Banks (at left in above photo), Lockleys Pylon (centre right), and Perrys Lookdown (far right). All iconic bushwalker destinations.







It's at the mouth of Oronga Canyon, a very scenic little canyon that you access from Bells Line of Road.

A dilly-bag in the sky

I was all geared up last week to photograph the blue blood monster purple super moon eclipse thing, but clouds got in the way. I had  my camera set up and ready though, so when the sky cleared again a few nights later, I pointed it up at the Southern Cross, where a new star had been born.

That's a lie of course. No new star, but a new name for one of the existing ones. Epsilon Crucis, the fifth brightest star of the constellation, had been reborn as Ginan, courtesy of the International Astronomical Union, as part of their programme to recognise the names used by indigenous peoples around the world. Ginan is the name used for the star for thousands of years by the Wardaman people of the Northern Territory. It represents a red dilly-bag full of special songs of knowledge.

Bromeliad time

Our bromeliads are in full bloom again. They never let us down - unlike all those azaleas and things that didn't survive the drought.

Don't they look good!

Not-so-stable genius bike scheme

A lot's been written about all those share bikes that are lying around Sydney's streets these days. It's not all been positive.

So what do we know about share bikes?

Seems they're a bit lazy, and love riding downhill, but can't handle the thought of taking themselves back up the hills. Hence the big stockpiles near the beaches, where nobody wants their services for the return journey.


They're not only lazy. They're clearly rather unstable too, many having seemingly committed bike suicide, throwing themselves off bridges and the like.




This share bike thing seemed like a genius idea at first. But I suspect we won't be seeing them around for too much longer.