Catching Up

Sorry I’ve been away for a few days! The wi-fi at our last stop wasn’t the best, which made blogging difficult. But no worries; let me catch you up.

Friday morning we went back to Sydney’s airport to catch a plane to Hervey Bay. Virgin Australia boarded the front half of the plane through the jetway to the front door, and sent those of us seated in the back half out on the tarmac and up a staircase to board through the back door. It probably took about the half as long to board as it would have taken in the U.S.

Flying from Sydney to Hervey Bay, in terms of distance, is about like flying from Atlanta to Washington, D.C. Keep in mind Australia is about the same size as the continental U.S. Hervey Bay’s airport, like the city itself, is tiny; two or three gates. And despite the spelling, Hervey Bay is pronounced “Harvey.” No, I don’t know why. Nobody in Hervey Bay seemed to know, either.

Soon after landing, we were on a ferry for the 50 minute ride over to Fraser Island. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site,and the world’s largest sand island. It’s about 75 miles long and no more than ten miles wide. Our home there would be the Kingfisher Bay Resort, an eco-lodge very popular among Australians,judging from the number of people there. I spent the last few hours before the sunset walking the grounds looking for birds. And I found some, too!

The next day, Saturday, was Australia Day, which Aussies love and celebrate very much the way Americans love and celebrate the 4th of July. January 26, 1788 was the date the first British ship filled with colonists arrived in Sydney Harbor. There is controversy here, now, because the Aboriginal people here call that anniversary “Invasion Day,” and there’s some talk about moving the national holiday.

We spent the day on a tour of the island. The first few stops were on the East side—the Pacific Ocean side—of the island. The wide, flat beach , and the 75-mile length of the island is open to cars. There were dozens of cars. trucks and tour buses, but they were mostly bunched at a handful of spots. One was our first stop, Eli Creek. It’s a freshwater creek that runs ankle to thigh deep for it’s last few hundred yards to the beach,and hundreds of people were there floating in the cool water. We walked along with them.

Our next stop was a shipwreck.

The Maheno was a WWI hospital ship sold for scrap to Japan in 1935. It was being towed to Japan when a cyclone hit, breaking the tow line. It washed up right where you see it. It’s pretty much rusted away in the 83 years it’s been sitting there. Eventually, it will all be gone. Eventually.

After lunch, we had a walk through the rain forest, and then a swim in Lake McKenzie. It’s a large, freshwater lake with beautiful soft white sand.

The Aboriginal people who lived here call the island K’gari. It means paradise. I believe it. My only disappointment was not seeing an azure kingfisher. But I did manage to get some nice shots of some other birds, which may be on a calendar next year!

We left Fraser Island this morning, picked up a rental car in Hervey Bay, and drove the 3 1/2 hours down to Brisbane. Brisbane is the largest city in the state of Queensland. What little we’ve seen of it is very nice. Roslyn found a sushi restaurant nearby thanks to Yelp, and it was both inexpensive and delicious. Back at the hotel, Roslyn found out the hard way that our shower wasn’t working properly. We’re now in a new room with a free upgrade thanks to the very nice staff here.

The Australian Open tennis tournament is ended tonight in Melbourne,and that’s where we’re going tomorrow.

The Bridge

Our last day in Sydney began where yesterday ended, at the Opera House. This time, we were there for the tour. It lasted about an hour, and it was fascinating. The story of the architect who designed it, how has design was chosen, and how the Opera House was built is a bittersweet and compelling tale. It’s well worth your time and money. I kept thinking about how much my friend Art would enjoy it. With his architecture background, he probably knows everything I learned today. But I know he’d love the tour, anyway.

On the way back to the hotel from the Opera House, we saw an oddity the distinguishes Sydney in my mind. Every big city (and a lot of small ones) I’ve ever visited has pigeons in the downtown area scrounging for food. Sydney has pigeons, too. But it also has these:

This is an Australian native known as a Rainbow Lorikeet. This one was at an outdoor cafe near the Opera House, hoping for a chance to grab a scrap of food. Roslyn took this picture with her phone from about two feet away, and the bird could not have cared less.

Next, we checked off the last item on Roslyn’s “Things I Really Want to Do in Sydney” list. We walked across the Harbor Bridge.

Some of our friends who’ve been here encouraged us climb the bridge, rather than just walk across it. That’s right, for the ridiculously low price of about $300, you can climb to the tippy top of the steel arch, up next to those flag poles. You can’t take a picture, because they won’t let you carry anything. You’ll be up there with the birds and helicopters, just 440 feet above the water. But there’s nothing to fear. You can’t fall off because you’re wearing a body harness. No one’s died yet!

No, thank you. We were quite content with the view from the pedestrian walkway.

Even on a cloudy day, it’s a great view. And it doesn’t cost a penny. Walking across the bridge and back took less than an hour.

Then Roslyn’s cousin Carol and her husband Victor picked us up so we could spend the afternoon together. We drove out to Manly, a suburb popular for it’s beautiful beach. We had a late lunch at an outdoor cafe and strolled down the beach crowded with surfers and sunbathers (it’s still summer vacation for the kids). But the best part was just having the chance to get better acquainted with family we really hadn’t known before this trip.

We leave Sydney tomorrow morning, and I’m sorry to go so soon. But I’m very excited for what’s to come!

A Night at the Opera

We woke up early after getting a solid night’s sleep, feeling human once again. After a big breakfast in the hotel,we were off to explore the Sydney Harbor area.

photo credit: Roslyn Konter

Sydney Harbor is enormous.It has almost 200 miles of shoreline, with 20 swimmable beaches and about 20,000 registered boats. There are several ferry services that shuttle people between the central business district and other communities along the harbor. We took one, and our first stop was the zoo. If you like zoos (not everyone does), you’ll enjoy this one very much. I was thrilled to see one animal that seemed free to come and go as it pleases: a kookaburra (see picture at bottom of post)

The kookaburra is native to Australia and New Guinea. It’s the largest member of the kingfisher family, but it doesn’t fish. It’s a carnivore, eating rodents and snakes. It’s call is a harsh cackle that must have reminded someone of laughter; hence the song about the laughing kookaburra.

After the zoo, we visited a beach community called Watsons Bay. We were waiting for the ferry there when Roslyn got a call from her cousin Warwick, who offered to pick us up at drive us around to show us some of the other beaches and other sights. And so we got a lovely guided tour of Bondi Beach, one of the largest and certainly most widely known of Sydney’s beaches; as well as half-a-dozen more. These beaches are all on the Pacific Ocean side of the city, and their waters are that beautiful mixture of deep blues and teal greens.

Back at the hotel, we washed up, and changed clothes for our evening’s entertainment. Roslyn’s cousin Victor had gotten us tickets to see La Boheme at the Sydney Opera House.

We figured, why just see the opera house, when you can see an opera performed in the opera house! It’s as beautiful inside as it is outside. I’m told the opera company is very good; but I confess here my knowledge of opera is such that I couldn’t tell good from bad. We enjoyed it thoroughly, except for the woman who seemed to have taken a shower in her perfume. See sat a row behind and a few seats down from us, sending Roslyn into respiratory distress. The opera house staff was magnificent, giving us different—and better—seats at intermission.

In the Good Old Summertime

I hate cold weather. It is one of my defining characteristics. So you can imagine my delight: when I walked into the airport it was 38 degrees on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of winter. When I walked out of the airport, it was 83 degrees on a Tuesday morning in the middle of summer. Hello, Sydney!

We spent our first few hours after getting settled in our hotel walking around the areas known as Circular Quay and The Rocks. But the jet lag hit us around noon and we needed to spend most of the afternoon chilling out in our room. We didn’t nap; the goal was to stay awake until regular bedtime.

We Ubered out to Roslyn’s cousin’s home for dinner. Roslyn thinks she had met Carol about 50 years ago, but she’s really not sure. Didn’t matter. The welcome could not have been warmer. Lots of food, drink, and cousins from ages 7 months to 72+ years. They were all such good company, I was sorry for the evening to end. But the children had to get to bed, their parents had to go to work today, and I was starting to fade. We were back at our hotel by about 9:30, and I’m pretty sure I was asleep by 10:00 (which explains why I couldn’t write this blog post last night).

Almost every Australian we’ve talked with so far has complained about the heat wave here. Our reply to each and every one of them has been, “We like hot. We came here for the hot.” The worst of the heat wave is occurring in the middle of Australia, and we’re spending all our time here on or very near the coast.

Surprise!

Sometimes I don’t know what I’ve photographed until well after I’ve done it. I always try to get my shot composition just right. But with wildlife, I often only have time to see it, hit my shutter, and hope for the best. Such was the case here.

This is a male Western tanager, with part of its dinner. We were staying at a hotel about 45 minutes outside Grand Tetons National Park for a few days this past summer; it was the only affordable spot we could find in the area. We had just spent a wonderful day hiking through the park with the best guide possible: my high school friend Lokey, who has lived in Jackson, Wyoming for many years. The park is practically her backyard and that’s how well she knows it.

I didn’t see any interesting birds on our hike, but once back at the hotel, I saw a flash of yellow flying through a tree. I went chasing it. When it would land on a branch, I’d start firing my shutter. My Sony alpha camera has a setting that allows the camera to keep taking pictures as long as I keep pressing the shutter release button. You could say it turns the camera from a single-shot rifle into a machine gun.

The tanager was moving so much, I didn’t know if I had captured anything usable. I remember my wife asking me when I got back to the room, “Did you get the picture you wanted?” And I remember telling her, “I don’t think so.”

But once I was able to look at the pictures on my computer, I found this! Not only did I get a clear picture of the tanager, but a clear picture of a tanager with what looks like a bee in its beak. Insects are the part of the tanagers’ diet that may be responsible for their scarlet head feathers. Most birds with red feathers owe their redness to a variety of plant pigments known as carotenoids. But the Western tanager is not most birds. It gets its redness from a rare pigment called rhodoxanthin. They can’t make this substance in their own bodies; so scientists think they get it from the insects in their diet.

Western tanagers are plentiful through Western woodlands. I saw them in Glacier National Park and I’ve seen them in Santa Fe. If you don’t live out West, I hope you get a chance to visit. Our National Parks offer more wonders than I can describe. It’d be a shame if you didn’t take the chance to enjoy what visionary public servants from a century and more ago took care to preserve and protect, just for future generations.

A fitting name

Some birds are named for their colors, like the cardinal and the bluebird. Some are named for how someone thought their call sounded, like the towhee and chickadee. Some birds are named for where they were first spotted, like the Cape May and magnolia warblers. And then there’s this bird.

If you had been the first to see this bird, you might have called it a stilt, too. This is the black-necked stilt, one of five species of stilts, and a common one all along the Gulf Coast. Only flamingos have longer legs in proportion to the rest of their bodies.

They wade in shallow waters to capture their meals of aquatic invertebrates and fish. Favorites on their menu include crawfish, brine flies, brine shrimp, beetles, water boatmen, and tadpoles. They peck, snatch, and plunge their heads into the water in pursuit of their food, and will herd fish into shallow waters to trap them there.

Black-necked Stilts nest on the ground. They tend to build on surfaces above water, such as small islands, clumps of vegetation, or even, occasionally, floating mats of algae. And there they lay one clutch each spring of up to five eggs.

I took this picture last winter in Florida’s Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. The annual birding festival there is next week, January 23-28. It’s a wonderful way to see all of Florida’s prettiest wading birds.

Snow Day

I post this picture in spiritual solidarity with all my friends in the Midwest and into the mid-Atlantic states who are dealing with the four letter word I find most offensive: snow. St. Louis, my home for more than 16 years, is getting about a foot this weekend.

A foot of snow will have far less impact on St. Louis than two inches has on Atlanta. Trust me; I’ve experienced both. In 2011, we got six inches of snow on MLK Day weekend. Temperatures stayed below freezing for almost a week, so the snow didn’t melt. The city was shut down for the whole week. A few years later, a midday snow storm caused such massive traffic jams that some of my friends didn’t get home from work until the next morning.

I took this photo a few years ago, shooting right out of an upstairs bedroom window into the dogwood tree next to our house.

Bluebirds live here year ‘round. And when it gets cold, they puff themselves up, using the air between their feathers as insulation. As snow here is pretty uncommon—we can go a two or three years without getting any, and rarely get more than a few snowfalls in a winter--it doesn’t seem to interrupt their food supply. So they come through it okay.

That is my wish for everyone being snow on this weekend.

Pecking away

Yesterday I wrote about a cavity a family had flickers had carved out in a tree next to my house. The picture above is a different tree and a different flicker, but the same general idea.

We were in Boulder visiting our son David a few years ago. We were walking through a nature preserve on the outskirts of town when we came upon this bird, very diligently cutting this tree trunk down to size. Flickers nest in tree cavities; both the male and female work at creating their home space, and both help incubate the eggs of their chicks. Very progressive.

You’ll find flickers throughout the US. You’ll see a flash of color in their wings when the fly off. In the East, that flash is yellow; in the West, it’s red. The yellow flash is why the bird is sometimes known as a “yellowhammer.” It’s the state bird of Alabama, which is why one of its nicknames is the Yellowhammer State.

Flickers are part of the woodpecker family, but they feed mostly on the ground. Ants are its main food, and the flicker digs in the dirt to find them. It uses its long barbed tongue to lap up the ants.

Flickers are gorgeous. I remember reading a story about famed naturalist and artist Roger Tory Peterson, in which he said his love for birds sprang from seeing a flicker as a child. I get that!