Tag Archives: nature

In which there is value in unexpected moments (and lengthy side notes)

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wolf spider finger

One of the nice things about unexpected situations is that they force you to stop and alter how you’re looking at things – life, the universe, everything, hunger, surroundings, people who drive utility vehicles around dark fields shooting at kangaroos…

Anyway. One of the things I discovered while camping… or should I say, confirmed while camping, is that no matter how delicious I thought I was to bugs in the US, I must be a rare treat indeed in Oz for I’ve managed to get bug bites while biking home from work, a feet which I did not think modern mosquitoes were capable of. While camping the story was no different, except that in addition to mosquitoes there were *flies*.

Now, we’ve been warned about the flies here. The folks we stayed with upon arriving in Sydney said the summer’s great but just you wait until the flies (dun dun dun). I have to say that in the suburbs of Sydney where we spend most of our time, the flies really aren’t an issue, so those warnings have been easily discounted. But in the bush? In the hot dry plains? Whoo. I’ve always looked at pictures from african countries designed to pull at your heartstrings, the ones with small children with swollen stomachs stand sadly, frequently with flies in the corners of their eyes, or on their lips, as something beyond reality. Not just because it’s hard to imagine, and IS heartbreaking, that there are plenty of people in this world who don’t get enough to eat, clean water, education, all of the above… but because how could flies possibly be so bad that you’d be complacent about six or seven of them sitting on your face at all times? Now I know. They’re relentless. They’re ever-present. They’re really freaking annoying.

And here I’m going to go into another segue: A Terry Pratchett book I read long ago before I ever dreamed I might live in Oz (and have read several times since) happens to be a spoof on Australia. It’s about a wizard who is unfortunately spat out of the dark dimensions back to reality only to end up in the Discworld’s equivalent of Oz. It’s called The Last Continent (living here makes the book even funnier). Anyway, one of the images from the book that has stuck with me the most is a modification this wizard made to his hat with lengths of string and bits of cork. He decorated the brim of his hat all around with corks suspended on strings, and the idea was to help keep the flies away a-la a constantly swinging horse-tail effect.

When warned about the flies here, I joked that I should get some corks and string them up around the brim of a hat for defense. I don’t think they knew what I was talking about, but they laughed anyway. However, one day when wandering around central Sydney with whip boy, I found THIS! AHA! They may be hats designed specifically for gullible tourists, but they do exist!!

Cork hats

Back to the main story. ANYWAY. While camping we each had sleeping containers, as well as a small tent that we set up most nights simply to hang out in, safe from the bitey things. The point of this is, that although we were awake and conscious for at least part of the night (most nights. There were exhausting exceptions), most of our time was spent behind some sort of screen, other than quick jaunts to the toilet. We were perfectly able to see the grazing kangaroos and sunsets and sunrises, but time in the open air at night was limited. (there was one exception to chase around a bunch of possums, but that was the exception)

Back when I first started this blog, my aunt asked for a picture of the southern cross. Sydney has far too much light pollution to get a picture of the stars, so I thought this camping trip would be my chance. Little did I know that the threat of massive itchiness would be more powerful than my desire to set up a good shot.

But when stuck on the side of a highway in the middle of nowhere with a steaming engine next to kangaroo-hunting nuts in trucks, it’s time to take another look at your surroundings.

As I described before there was time to explore the ground,

wolf spider in grass

peeking in holes

spidey in a hole

and playing with toads.

roadside toad

There was time to find strange mounds of tiny seeds (a truck that dumped its cargo? wha?),

ben with seed pile

dead bird carcasses and lots of trash, and there was also time to set up a shot of the sky, to capture the brightly shining stars.

Southern cross horizon

Here you go, Sally:

Southern cross

In which I discuss the particulars of some bugs being completely awesome, and others being annoying little buggers that need to die

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Last night I was out in the garden checking for beetles (more on that later) when I saw a tiny spider traversing between a cauliflower plant and a stick I’m using to tether a growing pepper plant. Anyway, this spider, it was traversing on a line of webbing, and it was carrying what I thought at first was a fly. On closer inspection it turned out to be a shiny droplet of water, like those that collect on the edges of some leaves at night as the air cools. It was carrying a droplet of water! When it got to the stick, it perched near the tip and sat still with the droplet, and as I watched, the droplet slowly grew smaller. Did you know that spiders did this??! I did not know that spiders did this! Carry water droplets?

Watch, observe, question, and get your mind blown every day!

In a bit of quick research, I haven’t been able to find out if this is common or not (I assume it is, and I’ve just never seen it) as a spider behavior. I know some spiders carry bubbles of air underwater, and lots of bugs use surface tension to their advantage… but it never occurred to me that spiders might do this, even though I know that some spiders need water beyond what they get through their prey. Some drink from puddles, others drink when they consume their webs in the morning with dewdrops on, and some drink from dewdrops. It makes perfect sense that a spider might take its drink to a safer location, but I didn’t know, and wow, neat.

It might be like that time I was walking through a graveyard at night and saw hundreds of worms sneaking out of their holes, stretching, reaching for each other. I thought, whoa! I didn’t know about this! How cool is this! What if I’ve discovered a new behavior?!?

And then I thought, oh. Earthworms. Nightcrawlers. Right.

But it was still a cool experience!

…

So, that was neat. But then I had to get back to my now nightly routine of beetle-hunting.

I planted our garden 3-4 weeks ago. Cucumber bushes, capsicums of different types, cauliflower, zucchini, an heirloom tomato, and some strawberries. These will all go very nicely with the forest of basil I’m cultivating in containers. I also have a small patch of oregano and thyme in there, but the basil gets to rule the place because, c’mon, duh. There’s feral rosemary growing by the back shed.

Our strawberries were doing well! We got two delicious berries from the largest plant. And then the flowers died. And some leaves fell off. The hell? It looked like the stems were being broken by something. No hail… no violent raccoons… And then some leaves developed holes. Aha! Bug attack!

I’ve patrolled for slugs and snails and seem to have conquered that problem, so this must be something new.

Ben went out that night to take a look and reported a couple of beetles. I took a vial out and came back inside with 20 or so tiny shiny obnoxious beetles that I was really quite unhappy about. They weren’t easy to see because they liked to perch just underneath leaves and quickly fell down into the mulch when disturbed. There seemed to be two similar but different types of beetles.

A bit of research and lots of looking through my watch glass led me to tentatively identify the less common type as Strawberry Root Weevils.

 

The other, more, shall we say abundant (teeming? seething?) type I think is the Strawberry Rootworm. They’re shiny, whereas the others are dull. They have shorter snouts. They are both really freaking annoying.

Images from bugguide.net

So now this is my routine: Go outside with a headlamp once it gets dark, examine every inch of the strawberry plants, get bit by mosquitoes, collect beetles, rant upon returning indoors. Repeat 3-4 more times before bed.

This is the majority of my haul over the last three nights. I left one vial outside and they baked in the sun. Not sorry.

The first night I came back with over fifty. Subsequent nights have had massively reduced yields, thankfully. They will attack other plants, but I have found them primarily on the strawberries. Sadly, they have been reduced from something about half as large as this:

Healthy older plant across the yard

To (there are [were] THREE strawberry plants here):

&#(%&

I’m certain two out of the three will live, but I’m not expecting any more berries this year.

Conclusion? In the future, plant strawberries in containers using potting soil. In lieu of going back in time, however… well, none of the websites I’ve found suggest any treatments other than “give up, replant next year at least 300 feet away.”

Je refuse! We will carry on, little berry plants, and see what we might accomplish!

Let’s all toast to the stubborn drive to spend at least one hour with the skeeters each night hunting bugs. They are going DOWN. At least I get to find things like water-toting spiders!

Gull Gull Gull Gull DUCK

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Today Ben and I went to an IMAX showing of The Last Reef. The film isn’t an important component of this post other than to say that if any of you ever have the chance to see amazing sea life up close and huge and in 3D you should absolutely do so. Wow! Also, I suppose I should add re: the film itself that it was a nice version of the whole “humans are destroying the world and should stop and it’s awful and depressing” in that it actually made a case for individuals changing their behavior and gave examples of how they could do so. Much more impactful, I feel.

Anyway, we were going downtown to this showing and we stopped at a Woolies (Woolworths, a grocery store. Ozzies shorten EVERYTHING) and picked up some french fries because, well, hot crispy delicious potato, duh. And also it was lunch. Shut up, mom, we ran out of time! The movie was an hour earlier than I thought! And I had a salad for breakfast! We walked the couple of blocks from the train station/grocery store to the waterfront where the theater was located and found a nice shaded stone bench to have lunch on.

Shortly after we sat down a seagull arrived and loitered, pacing in front of us while we ate. Conversation wandered but kept coming back to the seagull. We wondered how brave it would get, and how close it would come. Ben was going on about how terrible it is that humans teach wild animals to beg and did it just keep watch for anyone who came by to sit down and eat? So of course I had to throw a bit of potato to it. How could I resist? The seagull leaped into the air and gracefully caught the potato, and halfway through Ben turning to glare at me three more seagulls arrived. And the original seagull growled at them! Have you ever heard a seagull growl?? It was snaking its head up and down, bringing its head back into its body and fluffing its feathers and growling at the other birds.

I fell over laughing. It was so vicious! So commanding!

Eventually the other birds retreated enough that the seagull calmed down and stayed silent. So I threw it another potato.

I had to!

Ben took the fries away.

…

I really wish I’d taken video of the gull doing its thing. I figured it was hilarious and common enough that it would be easy to find on a birding website or on youtube, but I’ve just spent the last two hours trying to ID the gull and find an example of the sounds we heard.

I believe it was probably a Silver Gull, a very common species around Australia. Or a Red-Billed Gull which is more common to New Zealand. It’s main identifying feature was its dark red feet.

I can’t find any recordings of a territorial or aggressive or any call that matches what we saw. Oh well.

Avoca Beach, North Avoca Beach, and Terrigal

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I know I said the Blue Mountains were my new favorite place in Australia, but I think Avoca Beach is my new new favorite place in Australia. Sorry, Blue Mountains (probably only until I visit you again though).

Though we’ve moved into our own place, Viive and Ian were making a trip to their favorite beach last weekend, and they invited us along. Heck yes. And I’m so grateful to them for taking us. We’ve had a very busy couple of weeks full of adventure, yes, but also full of errands, errands, errands, and so much schlepping of furniture, lamps, heaters, fans, furniture, groceries, kitchen supplies, bathroom supplies, trashcans, side tables, and all of the little things that make a place home, all by hand, all on public transit and on foot.

Fortunately we were able to get the biggest things delivered, and our couch arrived the night before this beach trip! The door to our flat is a sliding door, like a barn door, so we were able to take the door off completely to try and get the couch in, but still. We got half the couch in two different times before figuring out the winning spatial solution involving a twist just so and a lift here and all of this with me having only one functional thumb to grip with. It was fun! But then we sat on it and watched a movie on the laptop and everything was lovely.

Anyway. The beach. The glorious wondrous peaceful relaxing idyllic silly beach.

I’m going to do a series of photos at some point called “me trying to lick things.”

Australia has a lot of sedimentary rock. If you remember, the Blue Mountains are old sandstone “mountains” which are actually high plateaus carved out by water.  Although the base of much of the continent is igneous and metamorphic, much of the continent is covered in a “thin veneer of mainly Phanerozoic sedimentary basins cover much of the Australian landmass (these are up to 7 km thick).” THIN VENEER?? Everything’s relative I guess. In any case, I’m definitely not a geological expert (though I may have aspired to such for a time in high school), so I’m not going to go into details, but the ancient sandstone (mainly set down in the permian and triassic ages) has been faulted, shifted, and lifted over time. Apparently, and I definitely didn’t know this, most of the harbors we have today are actually drowned river valleys, because the sea levels rose thousands of years ago.

The end result of all of these sedimentary deposits + shifting + erosion has been this:

and this:

Avoca Beach (and surrounding areas) are less highly trafficked than a lot of beaches closer to Sydney. But not just because it’s further away – because there’s less sand, and more rock! Beautiful interesting rock! I’m mostly going to let the images speak for themselves.

Check out the surge of the waves as the tide comes in. I guess there’s nothing for scale here, but that main boulder is probably about 10 feet tall:

Aside from us and the few other people wandering the rocks, most of the people off of the sandy area were fishing. I encountered one man who was busily scraping up little seaweeds attached in rocky pools. Upon asking, he said that as the water washed over the pools and retracted back out to sea, the little bits of plant matter would attract the kind of fish he was after, so he was priming the water for his fishing expedition.

What a way to spend a day, picnicking on rocks with family, maybe a couple of beers, waiting for your rod to bend, listening to the waves…

Much of the rocky areas were flat as above, but interspersed were also many beautiful deep pools carved out of the rock, almost supernaturally sunken into the flat surroundings.

Late in the day, at North Avoca Beach, before a tasty dinner of Thai, the early evening light drew out all of the soft deep colors of the sandstones with lovely reflections on the water. 

Ben took this shot. It’s perfect:

The little black blips are snails, holding on as water from high waves washes over them.

There was a trio of little girls playing on the rocks as we explored. They were shrieking and jumping and playing with the water, looking for critters in the shallow pools. Maybe examining these snails. So lovely. Must go back to Avoca.

The glorious blue mountains

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First, a question: my photos seem far less vibrant on wordpress than they do when I view them on my computer. Does anyone know why this might be? Does wordpress publish in CMYK? If so, arg. I know I could look this up, but then I’d have to go back and re-edit all my photos from RGB to CMYK, and that would make me sad. So, deliberate ignorance for now. Anyway, onwards.

….

This is my new favorite place in Australia. I’m not sure what my old favorite place was – maybe our flat? that one thai restaurant? – but this tops it.

I haven’t been able to identify this flower. It grew on the sides of sandstone cliffs which had water dripping down them.

We only have two weeks of our fantastic multipasses left, so we’re trying to take advantage of them while we have them by traveling to wonderful places at the ends of some of the rail lines.

The Blue Mountains National Park is a large reserve about 2.5 hours by train to the West of Sydney, and it’s home to a whole bunch of really old, really worn down, sandstone mountains. I think they call them mountains because there are big cliffs and the altitude is slightly higher than the rest of Australia, but to me, they feel more like awe inspiring canyons.

First things first: yes mom, I hurt myself, but I’m fine! I’m writing this a week after the fact and postdating it, so I can say with certainty that healing is progressing quite nicely. The deeply cut flesh of the thumb is all sealed up, and only the epidermal layers are left to heal! My curiosity in combination with a stupid multitool are to blame. I call it a stupid multitool because the blade doesn’t lock. That doesn’t mean I’m not also stupid for not checking whether the blade locked. The curiosity came in when I really wanted to see what was inside an odd looking growth on some bushes. The end result was the blade closing on my thumb and a rather lightheaded walk back to town with my thumb in my mouth wherein I drank a lot of my own blood and grew more familiar than I ever wanted with the interior depths of that digit. Ben was quite nice about it, and after finding medical supplies and a very nice cafe to let us use their bathroom, I was able to patch myself up.

Cool Australian product of the day: Dettol.

It’s an antiseptic that’s sold in a very concentrated form, so you dilute it 1:20 for use. Not only do I now have a strong belief in its powers (no infection! win!), but I think it’s totally awesome that it’s sold the way it is. I may be misguided, but I feel like an antiseptic for sale in the US would be sold dilute and ready to use, to either satisfy the public’s laziness or to simply make more money.

Anyway, after an impromptu lunch at the cafe that let us bloody their bathroom, we set out back down the “Charles Darwin Trail” that we had been on when I unfortunately delayed us. The trail begins a half mile from the train station at Wentworth Falls, and goes all the way to the national park itself, all through lovely bush and along a lovely creek that has eroded its way through the sandstone to form little undercliffs and waterfalls. We got routes from Wild Walks.

Turns out, if I’d only walked a little further down the path (we were only 20 minutes in) I would’ve seen another bush with the “growths” opened, and found out that they are actually quite oddly located seed pods. They seem to be rather randomly placed along the main branches of the bush. I thought they were going to be some kind of burl with a bug inside. When we walked back down the same trail at the end of the day, I picked up my original slightly dented unopened seed pod, still lying by the side of the path, and threw it into the creek.

I kept cursing myself as we walked for at least another half hour, until I became too distracted by the beautiful scenery and all of the fascinating plants that I’d never seen before.

The creek began as a little thing at the beginning of the trail, maybe three feet wide, but as we walked we kept crossing more and more feeder streams, and eventually the creek grew large enough to harbor lovely little rapids and waterfalls. I thought, oh! Wentworth Falls! How nice! Spoiler: no. not Wentworth Falls. Wentworth Falls is much more epic.

But that was part of what was so nice about the day. We had no idea what to expect. We knew we wanted to go to the national park, so we did. Only on the train did I start looking for trails to walk on my future device, I mean phone. We picked one that had a medium hard rating, was estimated to take 5 hours, and had “undercliff” in the name, because hey that sounds neat. So as we walked, the creek started getting more interesting, the terrain started getting more varied, and really, the point is, the walk kept getting more and more interesting the further we went. It was a perfect slow introduction to the beauty, and allowed us to appreciate each new aspect with equal enthusiasm. I loved it.

Sandstone can make incredible rock formations. I need to learn about the geology of this area, and about how some of these structures were formed.

To repeat myself, it was as if, maybe, rather than driving to the edge of the grand canyon and looking down and thinking “whoa, that’s neat, and big!” you got to watch the evolution of the land from tiny stream to awe-sucking-whoa up close and personal in a whole day of mind-blowing beauty.

It’s a stream! With a bridge over it! How cute! And look at those plants! I’ve never seen anything like that before. The flowers are so weird! Magpie! Hi magpie! Ooooh it’s a little waterfall! How pretty! MAN that’s a big Norfolk Island Pine. Cockatoos! In the trees! Wow they’re pretty but they sound like they’re dying. Oh my gosh, that’s a gorgeous waterfall. Look at how the water has sculpted the sandstone into ripples! Oooooh! Now the path is like a cathedral of trees! Another feeder-stream! Oh jeez, that’s a lot of stairs. Wooow, running water has the loveliest sound. Look at these eucalyptus – the bark is soooo pretty. Holy crap, that’s a big waterfall!…. Holy crap! Cliffs!…. Look at how tiny those trees are down there!… Holy crap! WHOA how do we get over there?… Oh my gosh, this is so pretty…. Oh my… wow…

It’s all part and parcel, the whole “ancient waterway” gig. HUGE COSMIC GORGES! Itty bitty tiny trees.

That’s not really a nutshell. Maybe an emu shell! But that’s what the day was like.

Things I am jealous of: Ben saw a snake! The last half of a snake, anyway. We didn’t know what it was until we went to the Taronga Zoo (later post) and Ben identified it as a Red-bellied Black Snake which is venomous, but is not one of the most deadly snakes in Australia. They tend to live in the bush by waterways, and are quite timid.

And now, a series of photos with commentary. Pretty pictures… lots of them.

Our walk began in the flat lands around Wentworth Falls.

And as we walked the creek grew bigger, and interesting sandstone rock formations began popping up. This is near where Ben saw his snake. Damnit, I was ahead of him, and I missed it!

One of the few places where we bumped into other people, the popular spot on the very top of Wentworth Falls. I love the pathways they’ve built. Giant stepping stones through the waterways.

And one of the warning signs on the railing: um, yeah. Not crossing that barrier.

This is what lay on the other side of that sign and fence. There are a couple hundred feet more cliff under the bottom of this picture.

There are incredible paths

And overlooks

And more paths…

We came across a pair of Crimson Rosellas who appeared to be nesting in a knot in a tree. One of them flew off, but this one here stuck around.

Another wildlife sighting was this here ant. The closest I can come to identifying it sticks it somewhere in the bulldog ant family, Myrmecia. They are alll over the place! I was surprised when I identified it, because I imagined it would be harder to find a bulldog ant (they’re interesting because their sting is awful. Dangerous things are interesting!). In addition to this type, we encountered several with the same body structure, but with opposite color markings – red body and black head.

The coolest thing, though, was a pair of these birds:

We didn’t know at the time, but it turns out that these are female Superb Lyrebirds, Menura novaehollandiae. If you’re not familiar with these guys, you should be, because the males put on incredible mating displays that can turn quite surreal because of their mimicking abilities. Click on that link to check out some videos. These two females were scratching for food in the undergrowth with their formidable claws.

I wanna go back!

 

Tidbits

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In Australian supermarkets, the only garlic available is beautiful purple hard stemmed garlic. #YUM

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Oz money has windows in it!

It’s also made of plastic, not cloth. We had a bank teller tell us that US money is hard to count, because it all sticks together.

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In Australian parks, signs limit hours of alcohol consumption to between 8am and 7pm. Hah! That’s a change. Ben and I spent a recent evening before going to look at a couch on top of a play structure, eating pizza and sharing a pair of beers. It was dark out already (our days are starting to get longer, not shorter), and we had to stay safe from pirates!

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Rain in sunny Sydney:

And a lovely sunset to follow:

The environment here is like nowhere I’ve been in the US. Mostly bright beautiful sun, cool rainy days, palm trees, lush foliage. But even when it rains, the air feels dry and I get thirsty quickly. It’s like a drier, sunnier San Francisco, I suppose. With way cooler bugs.