Darwin Festival

This last two weeks have been the Darwin Festival, some music, some theater, some performing arts stuff and some drivel, mostly drivel though, now I have a wide taste in music but I cannot get into Ethnic music, there have been some free concerts and even the pay concerts you can sit outside and listen for free, but the ones which were the ethnic output were beyond acceptability, listening to someone shouting tonelessly along with someone else singing OK to a racket of a useless musicians isn't my idea of easy listening music, I walked to one on the esplanade and kept walking back to the car as he was total crap, not that it was in a foreign language but because he was crap, totally toneless, completely flat, painful is the expression i would sum it up with. The this last Friday i thought there was a girl on from the USA described as the new Sheryl Crow and I like her, so i walked to the event and it started 30 minutes late and some guy came on wailing like a cat, along with some incredibly loud and not very good guitar playing, this went on for 3 songs and even though i was waiting for the girl i couldn't stand it any longer. When i got back home i read the guide and found i was on the wrong day, I was listening to some Timorese folk singer, man he was awful. So Saturday night i went along to the concert with beer in my back pack and sat outside for free in the Botanical Gardens, there were lots of drunken aboriginals wandering about in quite frighteningly large groups, I tried to look invisible, nothing happened luckily. So the music started and this Anne McCue was playing folk music to start with and it was OK, like a night in the pub with a local guitar player, then all of a sudden they leapt into soft rock and she was playing lead guitar, it was very good stuff, great rhythm and it was very pleasant. This went on for a short while then all of a sudden another concert behind me started up with some ludicrously loud bass playing to the point they drowned out poor old Anne, I couldn't hear what was going on, as i said i was sat outside the open air temporary stage built in the gardens, so i walked around the area and found a spot on the main road where i could sit down and listen OK, and when the music got better I could stand up and see over the fence and watch her on stage, I was almost dancing after about an hour, for me that is a sign she was OK. So I can say this was a success, but she will never be a Sheryl Crow, but it was only 10 minutes walk from my apartment.





On Sunday night was the closing event, this was a group of performing artists that use a 8 metre flexible pole that they stand on the top of and sway about to music, it is theater and pure entertainment, it is pretty watchable for about an hour and the kids thought it was fantastic. Far more important we all went for a curry and a beer afterwards.





So that was Darwin Festival, with the sway of some large globes it was all over again for another year. I know I don't like ethnic folk music as much as I ever did, it is worse now as they can get it played even louder.

Another Weekend Birding and Cleaning

Sounds a funny combination but as a responsible tenant I have been cleaning my apartment as it was becoming a swamp, I have to share a secret, I have hairy legs and generally pretty hairy, and the spot in the bathroom where i dry myself after i shower, the floor looked like a shaggy rug, the hair was piled high and as much as I hate cleaning I just had to get the vacuum out and go round the entire apartment and get rid of the hairs everywhere. Tiled floors are nice to look at but are a pain in the ass to keep clean unless you have a girl from El Salvador doing all the cleaning and preferably cooking also. but my wife is back home doing legal stuff and getting the little girl through school and i will be joining them sometime soon. but until then I have to clean up after myself and that includes the toilets and vacuuming my leg hairs off the bathroom floor.

Well this weekend my friendly neighbour who takes me birding managed to fit in a few hours on sunday, even though she is in the process of moving house, to take me to the local Rainbow Pitta spot and we were indeed lucky to see it and also a fantail that was also very attractive, We went to some mangrove swamps near town and just went wandering around until we heard some birds and went that way, we found some nice forest kingfishers and then we found the Rainbow Pitta, we moved to a different site where we had to walk along the beach heading towards the gay pickup spot at the nudist beach, there was a large collection of single men wandering about looking as though they had lost something but I was OK as I had my guide with me to protect me. We did see lots of interesting birds along the beach area, some lovely rainbow Lorikeets, everything is wonderfully coloured here that rainbow really does fit.

The Amazing Rainbow Pitta



The also amazing Rainbow Lorikeet



Little Bronze Cuckoo that I managed to get a shot of myself with my camera, that i hardly ever use, it is too tricky to get a good shot



my Local guide, we shall call her Doc



No murders here this week, I think but the death rate on the roads is spiralling out of control, there are dead people everywhere from managing to wrap there cars around the power poles, here they are made out of steel for the hurricanes and they dont move when a car hits them at any speed, the car tends to bend around it like a banana, usually killing everyone inside, the death rate is 6 times that of the rest of the country and they also had a random breath test evening and 1 in 31 drivers were over the limit, drunk as skunks, this is one of the root problems with the death rate, too many drunks drugged and stupid folks on the road. But it does thin them out a little.

Going Cane Toad Counting in the Botanical Gardens

I have been asked if I would like to attend a cane toad counting survey in my local Botanical garden, sounds a real hoot plus i could see the Rufous Owl that supposedly inhabits the afore mentioned place. Counting toads doesn't sound that scientifically meaningful but the cane toad is a terrible introduced pest because it competes with the local wildlife and is also incredible poisonous, when some of the local animals eat them as all toads are food for something they tend to kill the least resistant ones, like some of the snakes and some of the crocodiles, some birds here are tolerant fo the poison and will strip the toad of its skin first so as to eat the meat but miss the poison that is in some large glands on its neck, This has to be a first for me, some of the people who are also coming along will take the toad home in large plastic bags and put the toads into the freezer to kill them. making sure that you put them out for the trash collectors on the correct day or they tend to smell when thawing out apparently. So that is my Friday night out, chasing toads and not getting killed by the drunken Aboriginals that also inhabit the Gardens. There is a funny term used for vagrants up here and it is "Long-grasses" and even if these folks have to appear in court their address is "Long-grass", isn't that just bizarre

Birding In the Knuckey Lagoons and Sewage Ponds

I had a birding sunday this weekend and it was pretty interesting, surprisingly we first went to the sewage ponds, it is a very quiet and still place, I had to go with my neighbour who is the treasurer of the local Naturalists, not nudists, people who love nature, so she has access to the site, she has a special electronic pass that opens the gate, we went inside to find it alive with ducks swimming in the settling ponds, herons eating bugs and many hawks that were just roosting i think, they didn't seem to be attacking the other birds. We drove around the site, it is huge and they have about 10 large ponds, maybe 4 hectares in total. We sat in the car the whole time so as not to disturb the birds, and we could get closer to them by doing that, we sat close to the main inlet and the little herons were diving into the water and pulling out brown things, but these brown things had legs and tentacles, I thought it was very odd so finally asked the question what are they eating, it turns out they are eating the cockroaches that get washed down the drains and are flushed into the ponds, very funny, not what you were expecting was it. We traveled on to our next wonderful destination the local refuse tip, once we got close I could see literally hundreds or maybe a thousand birds of prey circling around, just a whole swirling mass of Black kites and Whistling Kites, just hundreds and hundreds of them, it was good but for only a few minutes, we then set off to the local jungle park, it is a nice picnic area and some nice walks but it was alive with black cockatoos and small Honeyeaters, I managed to see a new species for me, my list is getting longer. we then also went on to the Knuckey Lagoons, they are small local water holes that keep water all season and when we arrived it was full of birds, Geese and ducks and herons and egrets and even the large Black-necked Stork, it was amazing, the only thing you have to look out for are the local aboriginals, they were out looking for Turtles I think , but as they seem to think they own the country just because they got here first doesn't mean they can take everything, even anything as I want to look at these without them killing it all.

Anyway there was a murder in the park around the lagoons, it was some of the aboriginals who are alcoholic, which means most of them and they get stinking drunk and then just seem to kill each other from time to time, there has been 3 murders this way since i have arrived in Darwin, one in the Botanical gardens right next door to my apartment block, not encouraging for long term stays here then. But the birding is great, we spent 8 hours touring the places with many birds and I enjoyed every minute of it

Lovely Knucket Lagoons, unless your drinking parner goes insane and beats you to death

Village Idiot

At present my wife is back in Costa Rica doing stuff and so I am here alone in the remote north of Australia, my normal time killer when i am not asleep or at work is to go birding, I live net door to the fantastic Botanical Garden and I went for a walk around in the late afternoon sun, it is always sunny actually, I was just putting that in to build the picture, the place is almost tropical as you would expect for the tropics, but this is not normal tropics. This place has a very long dry season of 8 months and the surrounding countryside is pretty dry, it is a dry forest type environment. So I was walking around in the sunshine with my binoculars trying to find some birds and failing miserably. There wasn't much about at all, perhaps i was too late, afternoon isn't a great time normally but even so i could hear a few but see nothing, I was getting despondent. After my walk around the monsoon rainforest section where there is a Rufous Owl supposedly roosting, which i never saw, I was thinking about going home, but I followed the path up to the plant nursey as it was a part I had not been around before. I was looking around probably looking like a burglar or peeping tom with my bins and all the other folks here are old farts, just up for the winter, rich folks from down the prosperous south of Australia like Sydney and Adelaide and Bribaine where the weather is cold and rainy this time of year. So I saw a large bird fly over and head for a tree so I was getting desperate to see and identify anything so i followed and saw it land in a a tall tree and I saw it immediately challenged by a sitting bird in the tree and it bounced about being pushed about by other birds also in the tree, the tree was alive with large fat yellow birds. I was so happy I could have squealed with delight but for all the old farts around looking at the flowers and trees and bushes, not the birds, i didn't want to appear demented as well as a peeping tom. So I sat down on a large stone and started watching the bird show, they were fighting and squawking and bouncing about and eating lots of small berries on the tree, with my binoculars i could see them stripping the berries form the tree and the tree seemed to be full of berries like coffee beans, small green berries, all the smaller branches were full of them, The birds were bright yellow with a black head and a large red eye patch, beautiful birds but were fighting like crazy things, hoping to keep all the tree for themselves. it was a fantastic show and I was enjoying the birds but all the old farts just looked at me like i was insane. While I was sat there I could see a particularly well dressed woman looking at me intently and then looking at what i was looking at and then back to me, she was with a much younger couple and they were intently examining all the plants. The old woman finally plucked up courage to speak to me, "you a tourist then", she said. I was surprised at what she said, not "what are the birds" or "Are you a peeping tom" or "I think all the birds should be poisoned", So i told her I was living here now, she then said " What are you looking at", as though there is something up in the tree other than birds, I should have told her there were some large poisonous jumping Fungi, but I am not normally quick enough to think of some witty repost. I told her of the birds and that they were eating the figs and the birds were called Green Figbirds. She said, "Oh yes I live on the Golf course and we get birds also", it was a strange posh accent heavily laden with hints of chinese, a very strange mix. I started to smile at this response as only an idiot would say something so silly, she then added "I used to feed the birds and we used to get some green and red noisy things so i stopped feeding them", the description is of a parrot, this country is full of parrots, probably the most common family of birds here and her not knowing it was a parrot also means she is an idiot, I could only conclude that she was an old rich trophy wife from years ago, she was 60 maybe and you could tell that she would have been attractive years ago but she would have been a airhead, I was almost laughing at here stupidity but that would have been rude but it made me feel life was worth living again for 10 minutes.

Green Figbird

My First Week Back in Oz

On arriving back in the land of sand and beer, i had to go shopping, for food. I am a domesticated man and I am alone here once again for a while and shopping is the bain of my life, having to go to Woolworths for food about 3 times a week is like having teeth extracted, especially as i am usually suffering jetlag, trying to remember what you need and what you would like and what is critical to watching TV at night. The other thing is trying to get over the jetlag and not being late for work, life is such a busy thing, how do people find time to have affairs, I dont really know, they must have such pncy jobs that skipping away for 3 hours in an afternoon is normal, most guys I know if they had 3 hours free in an afternoon would usually end up in the boozer have a few cold ones. Anyway, back into the groove with work and lack of sleep, my body clock seems to have adjusted OK but was only out by about 4 hours which isnt bad for travelling all this way and skipping 10 time zones. SO I was crashing at 8pm on the sofa and then stumbling into bed at midnight, and then waking up at 3am, not good for feeling OK but at least i was getting all my mail done before I went to work. This last wekeend I went out briding with a retired neighbour of mine, she is a member of the local birdign group and she knows all the nice interesting places around Darwin. We set off at 6am to go to a tiny water hole where the gouldian finches have been seen in good numbers, these birds are not known for breeding in this area so much, perhaps right on the edge of their breeding zone but the theory si that the breeding area is shifting, maybe due to global warming, but these birds are just painted creations, so amazingly colourful and they come in large numbers. We sat for an hour just watching the birds fly in to drink and bathe and we had many successes, for new birds for me anyway.

Gouldian Finches




we travelled to the next spot which was a section of monsoon forest, it looked just like Costa Rica, heavy green foliage and very tall trees, it was close to a spring and had water all year round, only problem with briding in this type of forest is that you cannot see anything, the birds just hide in the trees and you see nothing, you can here them everywhere but see nothing.

We then went and had a picnic at Mistake billabong, a wonderful water hole with a bird hide in the water, we were able to eat out food and watch for birds but the only good one we saw was the White bellied Sea Eagle, a fantastic huge eagle that was just gliding over, maybe looking for food but probably just chillin'.

We then went on to Fog Dam, a man made reservoir, probably not for water collection as it was very shallow but maybe for recreation, which has been amazingly successful. there were 10's of thousands of birds there, just huge number of herons and egrets and spoonbills, the highlight of the day were two different species of harriers, the spotted harrier and Swamp Harrier, these dirdes were gliding about frightening all the other birds as they nornally eat them, they were huge and just amazing to watch

Spotted Harrier




Swamp Harrier




The only problem we had was that the two last birds of prey were so closely coloured that we were arguing about which was which, but what an argument to have. I would like to go back there one day and see if things get better as the dry season gets drier and the bird numbers get more as it tends to concentrate them in the wet areas.
Thanks Lord Buddha for the birds of this world he was very creative.