Meanwhile Back in the Northern Hemisphere

I find one disconcerting thing about travel is the way it yanks you in and out of seasons. In Australia it was a steamy hot jungle in the north, then a perfectly 70 degree wonder in the south and now back at home with one day on the calendar into spring, it is snowing. Or was snowing. And may snow again.

Snow aside, spring is here in the extremely modest way it begins on the Cape. Somewhere skunk cabbage is blooming
and last week, I heard the wood frogs croaking away in the chilly waters around the bog. Peepers are reported to be peeping and my Phoebe is back flicking its tail and looking ready to get on with the business of nest building.,
A crow flew overhead with a stick in its beak, and although it seems early, when I check Stokes guide on Bird Behavior it seems they are right on cue. The last week of March through May nests will be made, some that may only be decoys and one in the most sequestered of locations for the real thing.

We had some sunny days last week when I first returned and both in the woods and across my porch skittered the first chipmunks of the season.
I always tend to think these are males, first out and looking for action. I won’t see chipmunks on a regular basis for at least another month. The females give birth in their underground tunnels and are tucked away busy with childcare for some time, so again, regular hourly raids on the sunflower seeds are still a ways off.

My little seasonal barometer is in for another ricochet experience for as of this weekend I shall be heading down to TN where spring is in full swing and my daughter is about to have our first grandson! If once again there is a pause in the blogs know that I am fully occupied with our own nestling of a sort. Time again for my granddaughter and I to lay out yarn all over the bushes and see who takes us up on our free building materials. Last year it was amazing how quickly it was snatched up. The blackbirds that roost in the neighbor’s bamboo are back, so nature reporting from down South may continue.

There were still a lot of unresolved Australian topics to cover. Having the incredible fortune to see a Cassowary in the rain forest,
being on hand to watch “mutton birds” (Shearwaters) return to their nests at dusk, and finding Koalas right where they were supposed to be, and occasionally doing something other than sleeping, are all future topics, if time permits.

Meanwhile, Spring is officially here throughout our hemisphere, but perhaps showing itself in many different ways depending on the latitude you find yourself in. Woodcocks will be doing their dance in my absence this year, but anyone who is curious to read more about them would simply need to look at the blogs written a year ago if you wanted an refresher on Woodcock dancing.
Not that I imagine that is on the top of your “to do” list, but if it is, you should find them easily enough. Now, back to cooking and laying up enough meals to keep a husband alive for three weeks. Till free time comes my way again. Happy Spring!

Parrots Above and Parrots Below

Under the category of things that took me by surprise in Australia, you can add the plethora of Parrots! I knew there would be all manner of Parrot fish out on the Reef, and so there were, in more color combinations than I could keep track of.

I also knew there were parrots in Australia. The Field Guide to the Birds has 6 pages of parrots, 2 of Lorikeets (a smaller member of the parrot family) and 2 more of cockatoos so that should have been a clue that parrots weren’t a rarity. I just never expected to see them by the 1,000’s and smack dab in the middle of the town.

As it would turn out, every major city we visited had parrots as thick as thieves. Again, on the very first night in Cairns, along with the bats that were winging their way to the town at sunset, flocks and flocks of parrots came squawking and wheeling their way into the trees that lined the main street.
That I wasn’t run over, as I stood transfixed under the trees straining to see which ones had red cheeks, which ones had blue tails, etc., was a minor miracle. Just like the bats, the stunning thing was the immense number of them. By nightfall, the trees that line the main area of downtown Cairns were completely covered with what I think were Little Lorikeets and Crimson Rosellas.



Remember that I was with my daughters here, and to go to town to have dinner each night with a pair of binoculars around my neck was considered unacceptable. So strained looks behind thick vegetation made correct identification a little tricky. But, no worries, it was spectacular no matter what exact kind they were. And the noise! Deafening. So much screeching and chasing of one another with flocks alighting on branches claimed by others only to be chased away and resettle somewhere else. The cacophony in the trees was echoed by the cacophony on the street with music flowing out of the bars. I just kept thinking, if you can fly, and have the rainforest right outside the city limits, why would you choose the heart of downtown to spend your evenings? Perhaps a city lined with fig and all manner of blossoming trees is the answer. Plus they squawked half the night themselves, so maybe peace and quiet isn’t what they were after. Either way, chock it up to another “WOW me” experience in Australia.

And it wasn’t only in Cairns, which is near the rainforest, but in Sydney, same thing, parrots squawking outside our less-than-classy hostel in a less-than-classy part of town. Also along the Coast road in Victoria at a hostel in Lorne, and later in a trailer park further along the coast, we had trees festooned with Sulfur Crested Cockatoos.
It was really so remarkable. I suppose it just goes to show how little I really researched about the birds before we went. Totally commonplace to those in the know, but, as for moi, I kept an expression of, as an Aussie would say, “a stunned mullet” for most of my trip! A happily stunned mullet! But you gentle reader have been forewarned. Should you go, expect parrots, by the bazillions!

Back Up from "Down Under"

Well, I DID NOT getting eaten by a crocodile, or a shark, or bit by any venomous snakes or stung by killer jellyfish! How silly of me to have ever worried about that, but oh, it was FABULOUS! Now there are so many tales to tell from there, but keeping in mind you all have lives to lead, I shall keep this to one tale at a time. Let’s start with bats.

Who knew, surely I didn’t, that places like Cairns, noted as the jumping off spot for the Great Barrier Reef and Sydney, famous for its Opera House, were also home to thousand and thousands of fruit bats! Driving from the airport to our hostel in Cairns the first thing I spotted, well to be truthful the very first thing I spotted was, yeah, a Willy Wagtail, but right after that, a huge bat went winging overhead.
A three-foot across, mega bat, a Spectacled Flying Fox, one of thousands that roost in the rainforest but disperse at dusk to the many fruit trees in Cairns.
It was just wild, to have them flump, flump, flump right into a tree over our head, hang upside down and start eating the nectar from huge blossoms. I loved it! They are important pollinators of the rainforest trees and great dispersers of seeds, for they can easily travel 60 miles a day. That’s far more than the flitting of a butterfly or beeline of a bee so they are invaluable in pollinating trees that are separated by distance.

Check out this picture and see what great faces they have. The name Spectacled comes from the fact that the light fur around their eyes looks like glasses. And they look right at you.
As fruit bats they have excellent eyes, no need to use sonar to find a mango after all, so they don’t have the small eyes and oversized ears of the insect eating bats that use echolocation. And the way they move through the trees using the claw on their wing like a hand makes them seem more like monkeys than bats.

In Sydney we toured the Botanical Gardens, and hanging in the trees by the hundreds were Gray Headed Flying Fox bats, another fruit eater with a wingspan approaching three feet.
Amazing! Each tree had hundreds, for what they say is a total of 22,000 in the park! And their numbers are down by 30% over the last 10 years, can you imagine when they were at full strength what this would have looked like! We saw them by day, then at sunset they unfurl, and head out over the city in a huge stream of bats that looks like a scene out of the Wizard of Oz.
They were streaming their way to Centennial Park where they will dine on Eucalypts and Banksia trees through the night.
Again, no one had prepared me for this and it was such an amazing sight. In a city no less.


Now, the Botanical Gardens are none to happy about them choosing their sight, for the trees take a bit of a beating, and there are plans underway to start playing jack hammer sounds through the night to discourage them from camping there. It worked in Melbourne but bats have been calling this place home since the late 1800’s so they may be harder to talk into a new neighborhood. Habitat destruction in other areas it what leads them to this one steady source of trees. Again, their contribution as pollinators is one not to be eliminated, so hopefully they will find a place to relocate and not have their numbers further reduced. They say they can pass some 60,000 seeds through their system in one night and I would believe that, standing under trees where the ground was completely covered with tightly packed seeds from their dining. Wow, and I thought our roosts of winter robins were something to get excited about! So, what a bonus.

I expected fabulous reef fish in Cairns and found them, and the Opera House in Sydney was the imposing icon I thought it would be, but cities that rivaled Gotham in their night bat flights was completely unexpected and delightful. Indeed the whole trip was a naturalists dream, but, as I promised, one topic at a time. Parrots, by the thousands, in the trees and in the water will wait for another day.