Snakes and snoozing

Back at last. There was computer issues and some other offline crapulence which was really boring so we won't go into it. How was yer Chrissy?




Discarded snake skin. Found it under the holiday house. Apparently it’s a diamond python’s skin.

It’s very cool. Got no idea how to turn it inside out though, without ripping the bastard to shreds.




Saw a live snake too. One like this (Wiki photo). Red-bellied black snake, Pseudechis porphyriacus. Very sexy. Not a snake to go feral and bite the cautious admirer but very sexy.


The rest of my holidays was more snoozing than bushwalking. The weather was all over the shop, pissing down one day, back to normal stinking hot summer the next. I vegged out on the veranda and watched the brush turkeys and their chicks.

Photos & factoids




This poor little bugger died not long after this shot. Thought he was going to make it for a while there but no. He kept nearly getting to his feet then collapsing again.

He’s a baby brush turkey and he was mauled by a cat or something. Cats are not native to Australia so most of the native animals have no defences against them.

Buried him under the house and put a rock on top of him so he wouldn’t get dug up again and scattered about the place.

There was a brush turkey’s incubation mound further down the hill so maybe there was another chick that made it.

Roosting in trees
Immortalised on local bus-stop
Single Brush Turkey Seeks Same


Since I got back, the weather has been shit for walkies. Up around 34 (95-96F) one day, dark as night and stormy the next.


Haiti

Poor bastards. Bloody poor country, as corrupt as fuck, war, 3 hurricanes in the last 4 years (about that) and now the place is totalled by a massive earthquake.

So it's a bit off when those christian types were refusing aid to some people on the grounds they were of the voodoo religion.

The throw-away lines on the news about Haiti being the “home of the zombie” weren't terribly helpful either. Might be a bit smarter to point out that yer actual proper Voodoo/Hoodoo/Voudon/etc. zombie has fuck-all to do with the movie zombies.

Real zombies are people willingly taking part in a religious ceremony. They are spirit-ridden. They invite a good spirit into their body for a little while for religious purposes.

They aren’t green and oozing and they ain’t interested in eating your brain.

And while we’re on the subject, the voodoo dolls are bullshit too. They sell them for the tourists in New Orleans (and fuck knows they could use the tourist dollars, poor bastards) but they’re a Hollywood thing too, whitefella misinterpretation and invention. Sticking pins in dolls was something done in Europe many moons ago.

I loved and that Big Brother/zombie apocalypse piss-take on SBS but I do not enjoy my ABC making the sort of random statements I expect to find on bloody channel 9 or 7.

Now where’s my blood pressure meds?


Zombie linkage

Proper zombies

Haitian Voudon at Wiki
Voodoo Brings Solaced to Grieving Haitians
Living Vodou (podcast)
Louisiana Voodoo
Lucky Mojo (Hoodoo, similar to Vodou & Voodoo)

Movie zombies

Shaun of the Dead (rom zom com par excellence)
White Zombie
Bloody Ian Fleming
Dead Set (Big Brother vs the zombie apocalypse, on SBS)


Right. I'm off to set up base camp on the lower slopes of Mount Inbox.

Dark week

From blue blue winter skies to dark dark winter skies. Pissing down again as we speak. It's been a dark wet week in Woy Woy. I've been having the lights on at three in the afternoon.



Boy duck.

Went to Empire Bay when the sun was still with us. Had fish & chips on the foreshore. Bloody lovely day for it.




Girl duck.




Beautiful warm winter sun on water and shore.

And a couple of planes making weird contrails in the distance. See them? Above the boats. They looked like they were over Sydney.


Still missing

Can't find any fresh news about the Woy Woy bloke who went missing last week. They found his surf ski and life jacket and paddle off Saratoga but no sign of him, poor bastard.

Map

Full article at The Australian


Dementia walkies

Regular walkies helped a Dear Old Thing survive when he got lost in the bush last week.

"Dr Fulde believed Mr Ludbrook's regular long walks would have been crucial to his survival.

"Big time. People who walk serious distances - not just the 20-minute stroll with the dog, which is also good - do well in situations like this.

"His heart would have been able to deal with the stress much more easily that the average lounge lizard.

"In the end, that's what hypothermia does - it leads to heart attack - and having a healthy heart from lots of walking protects from heart attach as the patient cools down."
...
For decades, Mr Ludbrook's neighbours had become used to the sight of him walking the streets of Fernhill."


There you go. Us walkers are on the right track. Even when we're demented.


Full article at SMH

Easter Bilby

The Easter Bilby (right) and his longtime companion the Easter Wombat (left) with their child made with a turkey baster and a lesbian.

For Suzanne's kids. (Vengaman, bilbies and wombats are on the shelf in Woolies in Blackwall Road and in Kmart in Deepwater.)

Have a good Easter, peeps. Maybe by next week I'll have My Humps out of my head.

(But wait there's more: Always Argyll & the Scottionary, another translation thingy.)

Kookaburras

Wiki Creative Commons image

Kookaburra, Laughing Kookaburra, Dacelo novaeguineae.

Lots more kookaburras on the Peninsula lately. Maybe the La Nina was a good breeding season for them.

They are shy but live in the suburbs quite happily. The closest I've ever got to one was about 3 metres and that was prety unusual. Usually they get twitchy as soon as you look at them and then a few seconds later they're off.

They hang out in gum trees in gangs of three or four or half a dozen. As the sun gets low they give a few brief chuckles then they start up their chorus of full-on laughing. Other than the didgeridoo, you don't get a sound much more Straylyan.

MP3 of kookas laughing

(Device dear, you might consider the Blue-winged Kookaburra (D. leachii) as a replacement for Mrs Beaky as it specialises in maniacal cackling.



Kookaburra nest in a dead gum tree at Umina Beach. Can you see it?




The entrance to the nest is the small dark hole in the brown section. (Hur hur.)


Kookaburra factoids

* Breeding males have blue bums, "Breeding male: Centre of rump bright blue" says the library book

* They are silent gliders when they come in to land in a tree or on a fence

* They land with their tails up then lower them slowly

* They sit on a branch and wait for the menu to wander past

* They eat meat, rats, small lizards and birds, large insects and snakes

* They are biggish compared to something like yer crow and come in 28-42 cm (11-17 inches in the old money)

* Families groups are 4 to 8 birds

* Teenage kookas often sit alone on a fence or in a tree



Distributon map. Where kookas live in Australia. Red dot is Woy Woy.




An old photo of kookas found on the Powerhouse's Flickr.

"General information about the Powerhouse Museum Collection is available at www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/database."

(The internets has made it possible for museum's to show off the shitloads of fabulous old photos they've have stashed away. I *heart* the internets.)


More kooka photos

Families that laugh together stick together

So whats for Lunch?

Head shot

Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree (pool of photos)

Wiki has heaps of good photos

Hardys Bay

(Hardys Bay walkies #4)



Bustling Downtown Hardys Bay

View down Killcare Road to the waterfront near the ferry wharf, across Hardys Bay to The Rip Bridge. Look at the colour of that water.

It's yonks since I walked at Hardys. More than a year in fact.

To get to Hardys you can go via Empire Bay Drive and Wards Hill Road, or you can get the Codock ferry from Woy Woy Wharf during the school holidays. Get off at Hardys. (Map)




Bustling Downtown Hardys Bay from Heath Road Hardys Bay

That long jetty you can see is the public wharf and the marina. The ferry pulls in there (after waiting patiently for fishing lines to be shifted), there's a concrete boat and a crowd of yachts tied up along it.

At the shore end there's a public loo and a couple of nice shady trees, a bus-stop, 3 cafes, a real estate, a gallery, and a bottle-shop with icecreams, newspapers and milk.




Hardys Bay from Araluen Drive Hardys Bay

A quiet sunny day on the foreshore. You wouldn't be dead for quids.




Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo at Hardys Bay

Local resident enjoys morning tea. No idea what he was eating but he was clearly enjoying it.

Wooden boats in Hardys from another post last year.

I'm buggered. Had a rowdy weekend and it's bloody ten thirty already. Shit, I've missed half of Shameless.

Waterfowl & land birds of Brisbane Water

(Walkies gleanings)



Shag on a rock on a hot day. Just near the Veterans Hall ferry stop at Henderson Road Saratoga.

All these walkies I do make me notice stuff I never noticed before. Stuff like the flowers and trees and birds. I don't know a lot of the names of them but I like to see them living along side us humans, floating on the water between the ferries, wandering about on the foreshores, harassing tourists for chips, that sort of thing.




Waiting for fish heads at Correa Bay Reserve Woy Woy Bay Road Woy Woy South.




The bog standard breed of ducks, hoping for free food at Empire Bay. Someone got on the ferry with hot chips and the ducks soon clustered round. Buggered if I know why because if you chuck them a chip they won't eat it.




Pelican soliciting for chips at the fish and chip shop on Brick Wharf Road.

(In the background is an interesting 1950s block of units called "Caprice" in red brick with a pattern of dots on it formed with white bricks. The block was demolished last year, possibly earlier.)




Still can't believe how close I got to this kookaburra. They're normally very timid. This one seemed to be waiting for the local office workers to deliver its lunch.

Kookaburras are seen at all times of day up on the hills and ridges, but here on the flat of Woy woy they come in groups at dusk and laugh in gum trees.




Brush turkeys. They look like such ungainly buggers but they climb these trees quite easily, slowly placing one scaly foot ahead of the other on the gently sloping branches.




Rainbow lorikeet in bottlebrush, Woy Woy. Lorikeets are rather shy birds but as noisy as buggery in groups. At dawn they cluster excitedly in flowering trees, squabbling over the best blooms and waking up the neighbours.




Pink & grey galahs feeding in a jacaranda in someone's back yard in Umina.




Sulphur-crested cockatoo (white bird). Haven't yet got a decent photo of one of these. They move too quick and perch up high in tall trees.

The other birds are a couple of plump owls of some sort, a rainbow lorikeet hanging upside down to feed and there's a nervous-looking tree possum down the bottom.The black birds flying at the sides are black cockatoos, a seldom-sighted bird.


Colin

It's all over the internet that Colin's been put down (euthanased). Poor little bugger lost his mum last week and was found nuzzling a yacht in Pittwater, just across the water from here. A post-mortem revealed Colin was actually Colette and her mum's body may have been found washed up on a beach down south. Wildlife officers had to put the poor thing down as she was getting weaker and weaker and they couldn't feed her.

From the Herald:
"A female humpback whale abandoning her three-week-old calf? Not likely.

Experts say a baby whale alone in Sydney's Pittwater was probably separated from its mother by force. ...

The baby humpback, believed to be about two or three weeks old, was first spotted on Sunday, nuzzling up to a yacht in an apparent search for its mother.

Authorities have suggested that the calf, nicknamed Colin, may have a biological problem, which led its mother to abandon it.

Experts have disagreed, saying a humpback female is very unlikely to abandon her calf, and would nurture it if it was sick.

Wally Franklin, Hervey Bay-based marine biologist with research group the Oceania Project, says ships in the waters off Sydney could be to blame, because they can break up sonic communication lines between whales." (Humans could be to blame for stranded calf)

Sydney Morning Herald


The truth about mozzies

I posted a map and some stuff about the paperbark forest last month, the wee jewel officially known as the Everglades Lagoon Wetland, nestled amongst the paperbarks next to the local golf club.

The crowd that looks after the wetland is having walkies there next month, combined with talkies.

From their flyer:
"Everglades Wetland... Walk & Talk
Saturday 27th September, 2008
RSVP by 24th on (02) 43494756
Email: wetlands@cccen.org.au".


Nose to the grindstone

Spoke too soon about getting some time off. Got an unexpected job dropped into my lap. Some ghost-blogging. The writing sort not the woo woo sort.

So anyways, Tuesday's post may or may not be late. Put yer email in the thingy to get pinged.

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The Easter Wombat

No walkies today. I am not feeling terribly sprightly. Nothing major.




Easter this year has been out-sourced and will be brought to you by the Easter Wombat and his long-time companion the Easter Koala.

Russell's Burrow and other wombat sites list three species of wombat, the Common Wombat, the Southern Hairy Nosed Wombat and the Northern Hairy Nosed Wombat. But every true Straylyan knows there's a fourth species: the Fat Arsed Wombat.

Happy Easter, peeps. May you burrow deep and find many tender leaves!