Wildlife and sleep

Well our young dingo is still around. It seems to have taken to howling at all hours just up the hill behind our house.
I suspect it is trying to carve out its own little territory between those of other dogs.
Or maybe it doesn't know the etiquette yet? 

I like to hear it is around, but random howling in the dark of night is not good for my sleep.

Speaking of sleep... last night there was a noise something like a fizzing-chattering noise (if that makes sense) coming from the roof of our back porch.

I had to investigate and this is what I found.

No, this sweet little creature is not a mouse. She (and I am fairly sure it was a she) was arguing with this fellow.

What are they?
They are Antechinus, probably Brown Antechinus (Antechinus stuartii). Despite their mouse-like appearance they are actually a marsupial (like kangaroos, koalas, wombats and other Oz animals).

They are common in Oz forests, but most Aussies have never seen one (or perhaps realised they have). They live in forests and are nocturnal and mostly people who see one think they have seen a mouse. Hence they don't really have a common name and get stuck with their scientific moniker.

So how does an Aussie tell the difference?
Well these guys are a little bigger than a mouse, their ears are rounder and they have much pointier noses.
Plus in terms of behaviour they are like mice on speed!
They leap and bounce around as if they have no tomorrow. Which is kind of true, male antechinus only live a single year dying of stress related disease before their first birthday.

Unlike mice they do not gnaw. Instead of the big incisors mice have, these guys have a mouth full of little needle like teeth. They make their living as predators, mostly eating insects and spiders.

Oh and they don't squeak! They fizz and hiss at each other far more loudly than such a little creature should.
Here's to an unbroken night's sleep.

Cuteness Plus

My Piccie of the day was taken in The Grampians nearly 12 months ago.
Deb had a sleep-in in the motel we stayed at, while I got out and about in the frosty morning light. Among other things I was rewarded with this nice shot of an Eastern Grey Kangaroo (Macropus giganteus) doe. As you can see she has a joey in her pouch.
Joey has grown so big she barely fits. As well as her face and forearm you can see her large toes poking out too. She has had to double up to squeeze in.

Her mother would have already mated again and be pregnant. Interestingly unlike placental mammals where once a pregnancy begins it must go through to the end, marsupials can "suspend" a foetus. As soon as Joey is out of the pouch mother will send a signal to the baby inside and it will begin growing again.
The new baby is born tiny, less than an inch long, blind and with forelimbs only partially developed, the newborn has no visible sign of tail or the massive rear limbs it will have in only a few months. Using its arms it climbs unaided up and into her pouch where it latches onto one of her two teats (a kangaroo's teats are in the bottom of the pouch). It will stay there locked to the teat and continue growing until it is a small version of mum (like this joey) before coming out.
In the meantime Joey will be allowed to continue putting her head into the pouch to feed from the other teat for a few months more, until mum decides she is independent.

A long story to a short answer

A few weeks ago most of the five of us (Deb + me, E our eldest and Lu our youngest) went for a weekend drive to part of the Gippsland coast in east Victoria.
Io stayed home with Lilli (no dogs allowed in national parks in Oz)

It was by our standards a fairly short run of only about 2 and a half hours drive each way.
Anyway after having a relaxed lunch and poking around a bit we ended up at the rugged coast line between Cape Paterson and Inverloch.

Deb and Lu looked at the weather,

which was really threatening to rain and elected to stay near the car.

E and I decided to climb the stairs down to the beach to have a look at the rocks out towards this interesting feature called “The Eagles’ Nest”.


To give an idea of scale I would guess it is around 5 stories high with the cliffs about double that.

Despite the threatening storm and the late afternoon we took advantage of the fact that the tide was falling quickly. You can see as we crossed the area the platform was becoming exposed by the retreating tide.

Interestingly the rock platform at the base  is made up of sedimentary rock that was formed on a flood plain back in the Cretaceous about 115,000,000 years ago.

One beach to the east is the only current dinosaur fossil dig in Victoria known as the “Dinosaur Dreaming” dig. And in 1903 just to the west was the first discovery of a dinosaur fossil in Oz known as  the “Cape Paterson Claw”.
So as well as the usual hunt for starfish and periwinkles I had my eye open for fossils.
As we got closer to the Eagles’ Nest
I began noticing literally dozens of chunks of petrified wood in the stone.
This was the largest piece we found.
I like the way the water was rippling across it in this piccie.

And from another angle with E’s hand to give a scale.

As you can see it was a decent size and beautifully preserved. It was hard to believe it felt like solid rock, not wood, to the touch.

Now we come to part of the point of this whole story.
One of the local denizens was this White-faced Heron, Egretta novaehollandiae

I took a few shots of him before he took off.

For those of you who guessed feathers for this image you were 100% right.
 
Here is the un-cropped piccie

I told you I wasn’t going to be tricky!

A Mystery Revealed

Linda G guessed a platypus which is a non marsupial native Aussie (a monotreme to be exact).

Susan got nearer than she thought with “Doesn't look like feathers”

Zoologist Kristen had two goes, she got very close but picked the wrong guy. Yes some feathers do look like fur! (And Oz has about 60 native rodent species so that was a good guess too)

Sorry Carolyn V not a Kanga.

Myrna it is feathers but not a cockatoo!

So closer this time but the mystery critter is
A fairy penguin !

Also known as little penguins (Eudyptula minor) and blue penguins these guys are found in the waters around Southern Oz and Kiwiland (uh New Zealand).They are the smallest of all penguins and are ultra-cute.

They breed in burrows in colonies scattered around the coast of Oz and NZLike my last tough one I posted a piccie with this guy some time ago.

I shot these guys at Melbourne Zoo. The Zoo population were either bred in captivity or rescued in waters around Melbourne because they were sick or injured.

There are a number of colonies in Port Phillip bay the closest being at suburban St Kilda.

Hard to trick!

Well Anne who guessed first pretty much hit the nail on the head with her guess of " a lizard or iguana..." And most of the rest of you were pretty close with guesses of other scaly creatures

This mystery object was cropped from this close up portrait of a Shingle-back lizard. This was a guy I moved off a road in NSW about five years ago. They are slow moving with stumpy little legs so they definitely do not mix with cars.

We don't have iguanas in Oz (except in zoos) but the land down under is a kingdom of reptiles. We have 860 known species of reptiles hundreds of which are lizards, from tiny skinks a few centimetres long to giant 2.5 metres (8 ft 2 in) Perentie goannas (Varanus giganteus).

Anyway shingle-backs (Tiliqua rugosa) are a blue-tongued skink very common to areas west of the Great Dividing Range (and on dryer parts of the range too).
This is another portrait of an animal I moved off a road in the Grampians on my last visit.I think they are so ugly they are cute!
You can see from their shot tails why they get the name "bob-tail" which is their common name over in WA.

This piccie of my Grampians one shows why "shingle-back" is also apt.They vary in size quite a lot with adults between about 30 to 60 cm long (1' to 2'), most of them towards the shorter end of that range. They are one of my favourite lizards, and totally innocuous.
Relying on bluff to try to scare predators away. They pop open a bright pink mouth and flop out a very blue tongue to look alarming. The Grampians one obliged me with a show.
They have small blunt teeth, if you handle them carelessly they can bite, but their bite will not break the skin (it is like being squeezed by a pair of pliers). Certainly their bite is unlike dragon-lizards which I can attest from personal experience have a painful bite full of needle like teeth.
By the way all native reptiles are protected by law in Oz and should be left alone (but I can't help but move the poor sods off roads before they get cleaned up by a car.)
I have very warm memories of these guys, when I was a small child we had some living in our garden. That is a good thing because just about their favourite meal is a juicy snail.

Now I can see I am going to have to try to make the next mystery object much harder!

Death and Wildflowers

A very quick post tonight.

Yesterday as is our wont Deb and I got out and about.

We stayed relatively close to home, deciding to have a late breakfast and head for an abandoned gold-rush era cemetery.

After a light shower in the morning it turned into a beautiful spring day.

You can see from this piccie what a bright sunny afternoon it became.
Welcome to the Queenstown cemetery which was in use from 1860 until 1981.

Most of the 380 recorded graves were from the gold-rush and pioneer era.

Showing the standards of the time there are believed to be a significant number of unrecorded and unmarked graves of Chinese gold miners. Evidence of most graves including the recorded ones has vanished, destroyed by a bushfire in 1962.

My intention was to make a record of the graves and cemetery (I love cemetaries).

But I was quickly distracted. Because spring means wildflowers.

There were hundreds, many of which I have never seen before. Remember I have only lived in Victoria for a few years and Oz has an incredibly regionally diverse flora.

Just two of the beauties I captured were a Spotted Sun Orchid (Thelymitra merranae)
And a close up. Isn’t it exquisite?

A white Hyacinth Orchid (I think) I’m not sure of the species, more research is in order.
Speaking of research I posted this piccie of a cute bird, but didn’t know what it was. It turns out s/he is a White-browed Scrubwren (Sericornis frontalis).

Thanks for the reminder Amanda

Next: Killer Plants

Home Safe

A quick one tonight.

I got home safe from Mum’s house late on Tuesday night.
I had a lovely time but all good things come to an end.

Mum lives 1300 km (800 miles) away so I don’t get to see her nearly as often as I would like. It was quite heart wrenching to come away. She is still fit and healthy but at 82 years of age I am painfully aware that she won’t be around forever.

Mind you having said that she comes from a long lived line on her mother’s side so I hope she will be around for a good while yet!

That’ll do me for tonight except I have as usual come home with a pile of piccies. I will share just two tonight.

A pair of fire-tail finches (Neochmia temporalis) also known as red-browed finches. These native finches are about the size of a sparrow. They form pair bonds and these two seemed very cozy so I guess they are mates.

A common or laughing Kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae) these guys are common across eastern Oz. They are a giant kingfisher (about 45 cm long) their main prey is reptiles such as lizards and snakes. They swoop down from their perch and carry their prey back into a tree. They dispatch a snake by battering its head repeatedly against a branch before swallowing them whole!

Two Missed Milestones

My last post was my 300th post.

I can’t believe it 300 posts and I missed my tri-centenary!

Of course that has made me think about my blog and realize I missed my blogs second birthday back in July. On 8 July my blog was two years old!

At least it wasn’t a wedding anniversary I missed!

That is almost it for tonight, I got home really late because a train broke down on my line. It took me three hours to get home not the usual 90 minutes!

On the weekend I went on another waterfall hunting trip.
On the way there I paused to capture these shots of wild Sulphur-crested Cockatoos (Cacatua galerita).These beautiful parrots are one of most common birds over large chunks of Oz.I have to say they are one of my favorite birds.I think they are simply beautiful.

Grampians Part II

I woke early on Sunday. Leaving Deb asleep in the motel I went out for a stroll to see if I could catch some shots of dawn in Halls Gap.

It was a frosty morning (remember it is winter down this way) The local wildlife brave coming down into the town before people stir.

These are eastern grey kangaroos.

I was able to get quite close. It has been a good season so the kangaroos are busy raising their young. Being marsupials they carry their young around in pouches.

Cute aren’t they?After breakfast we headed out for a day in the northern Grampians.I paused frequently to catch shots of the ranges.
At one spot I caught this little wildflower.Along this bush road we came to the foot hills of Mount ZeroI paused to catch more wildflowers.All around the Grampians Heath Myrtle was floweringA close up. Further along the road we reach our destination for the morning,
The Ngamdjidj Rock Shelter on the walls ancient Aboriginal paintings