Top Birds & Everyfing

The Manhattan High Line

The High Line in Western Manhattan provides a quiet walk surrounded by nature. It was landscaped on a disused elevated railroad.

Frozen turkeys were the last freight carried on the elevated rail way that ran over streets and through buildings on the west side of Manhattan Island. After that it fell disused and nature began to reclaim it. Grasses, shrubs and trees grew in the gravel among the steel railway lines. Part of the line was demolished until locals successfully managed to convince the authorities to retain the un demolished section and make it a public park.

 

The High Line passes through some of the older and more run down areas of Manhattan. The Hudson River and New Jersey in the background. 

Now there are over two kilometers of aerial walkway from 30th Street West southwards to Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District. The pebble concrete path strolls beside, wooden seats, grassy lawns and gives elevated views of the city. The railway lines have been left in place and the grasses and woodland trees grow out from between them. A wetland section has water flowing over the pavement where you can sit on the wooden seats, remove your foot ware and paddle bare feet alongside tall reeds.

 

Good views can be had looking down the East - West Streets of Manhattan Island.

We sauntered south along it’s entire length, stopping frequently for a relaxing look over the Hudson River, the old buildings and warehouses around Chelsea, and lunching in the tunnel where the railway passed through the Western Electric building.

 

The original railroad passed through the General Electric building. I'ts now a nice spot to shelter for lunch and buy a coffee.

There are lots of unexpected and innovating aspects to New York City and this is just one of them. And while it doesn’t have the huge expanse of Central Park, the High Line provides an unhurried natural place above the hectic bustle of the city below.

There's even a patch of lawn to walk on and wooden benches to relax.

Thanks to the Carbon Tax Emperor Penguins Are Not Going to Alice Springs

The Carbon Tax has ruined the old mate’s plans. Now that global warning has been stopped in its tracks and a rising sea level is no longer a possibility the old mate is going to miss out on his long held ambition of seeing penguins not to mention going surfing before breakfast. 

This winter has been as cold or colder than a well diggers arse on the Klondike. Gale force winds blowing straight off the Antarctic have been blowing the feathers off the old mate’s roosters.  This apparently is a result of global warming… but no longer… global warming has been vanquished, defeated and eradicated thanks to an universal and all embracing Carbon Tax.

Anyway, anyway, anyway, the old mate had been taking global warming so seriously that he had been preparing for the inevitable rise in the sea level. Secretly he’d actually been quite looking forward to it. After all it’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow some good. The sea only had to rise a couple of hundred feet and each morning instead of having to stroll down the hill the few hundred yards to the beach to go for a swim, he’d be able to have a dip from his back yard. His shed could become a boatshed. He intended to attach a diving board to the back of the shed so with a few gazelle like bounces he’d be able to spring into the air and belly flop into the briny…. three nines and a ten!

And another thing, prior to the defeat of global warming he’d planned on days spent relaxing on his back veranda, that he’s half started already but not got around to finishing, so that he could have had an uninterrupted view on the West Antarctic Ice Shelf as it drifted north on it’s way to Alice Springs. The old mate has been so excited as he has never seen an iceberg or a penguin. So his expectation of seeing hordes of Emperor Penguins taking a ride on a vast iceberg as it melts it’s way northwards would have been the icing on the cake… and one more tick on his bird list.

Not exactly an Emperor Penguin... this rather tatty photo of a Yellow-eyed Penguin was taken with my old camera back in 1968 north of Dunedin on NZ's South Island.

You can’t blame those male Emperor Penguins from wanting the globe to warm anyway. No penguin in his right mind is going to want to stand around shivering uncontrollably all winter, battered by one blizzard after another, while at the same time trying to balance an egg on his feet. While this form of male parenting is going on their wives, partners, girl friends, or whatever penguins call their spouses, are away having coffee, or whatever penguins drink, and gallivanting about the place for months on end leaving the old man colder than a well digger’s arse on the Klondike... or have I said that already. Sadly, for Emperor Penguins, the anticipation that those blokes would be able to sprawl about eating prawns while basking in the warmth of an Australian summer is now gone forever!

And another thing… the people of Kangaroo Island will be rejoicing that their island is now no longer threatened with sinking forever into the Southern Ocean even if the old mate is secretly a little disappointed. Turning Kangaroo Island into a mere blip on the depth finder would have allowed the Southern Ocean swells to surge up the Gulf St Vincent and turn his beach into a fantastic surfing mecca…

 

Two-headed Amoeba Discovered in Tasmania

Obsession on inventing and discovering things is a male thing; Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, Albert Einstein, Louis Pasteur, Georges Lemaitre and Francis Crick to mention a few. If Gertrude Darwin had published Charlie’s theory of evolution it would be Wallace’s Theory of Evolution or even worse… we’d still believe in God…

Anyway… a yet un-named female researcher in Tasmania recently made an important scientific discovery, as she was about to dine on fresh corn. It was a discovery that could turn the tables on when evolution began. Predictably the results of her discovery have been either ignored or ridiculed. She is a sister-at-arms of Barbara McClintock who was in 1983 awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine forty years after her own discovery, also on corn, which is an a-maiz-ing co-incidence. She too was ignored until after many years when the high priests of science finally, and no doubt reluctantly, recognised that she wasn’t talking baloney. These girls should have been blokes.

 

The whole drama began a few years ago when the old mate, who lives in a no-horse town in Tasmania that Henry Lawson would describe as a days ride west of nowhere, sold his last remaining one horsepower hay burner. Even calling it a town would be a charitable description… it is more or less, well less actually… to this day it is just a few houses either side of a creek and about ten inhabitants some of which are reputed to be sane. The old mate has spent his whole life there and apart from an occasional trip to a nearby coastal town he’s never left the place. It’s a few days ride to the coastal town on a rough track and he usually spends the best part of a week fishing off the rocks,

The little hamlet was once a two-horse town because the old mate in question once had an old horse and a young horse that added together made two horses and as no one else in the town had a horse… a two-horse-town was the deal. The town is otherwise unremarkable other than, and unknown to its inhabitants; the green pastures that surround the place contains a rare trace element that causes the grass to grow with a special nutritional significance that causes horses that eat it to be able to gallop really really fast. The reason they are unaware of it’s amazing properties is that no-one in the village, other than the old mate, had a horse and he never did anything faster than a slow amble, as you do in a town up in the hills of Tasmania.

 

The old mate's one horse power hay burner...

Anyway, back then, the old mate lived by himself, apart form his wife and a dog, in a corrugated iron shed on a couple of acres on the edge of the two-horse-town and he had a few more acres across the other side of a hill where he scratched a meagre living. He had an old cart that the old horse used to pull back and forth over the hill until one sad day the old horse dropped stone dead.

Not only did the town then become a one-horse-town which is about as inconsequential as a town can possibly become, but the old mate had no way of getting things backwards and forwards from his scrub ridden block of weeds and fallen timber that he called his run-out over the other side of the hill because while the young horse didn’t mind being ridden around the paddock it was beneath his dignity as well as being far too flighty and bad-tempered to get hitched up to a cart let alone pull it in a controlled and useful fashion.

Some time later the old mate rode his young horse to the coast for his annual fishing trip. He just happened to meet this young, flash, dodgy looking bloke who offered the old mate… who incidentally back then was also a young bloke… an unimaginable amount of money to buy his horse and then entered it in the Melbourne Cup and it won at odds of a hundred-to-one making the dodgy bloke rich and famous which is about as good as it gets… moving on, and so it became a no-horse-town and a one-car-town. The old mate promptly bought a brand new EH Holden sedan and drove it over the hill and parked it in his now vacant stable. 

Anyway, anyway, anyway, the old mate kept that car immaculate… for almost a week anyway. And because he couldn’t hitch the horse cart to the car he started carrying things back and forth from the acres out-the-back to the home paddock in his new car. To start with he only used the boot (trunk) that soon became full so he began carrying things on the back seat.

Now sheep don’t like being carried in the boot of a car so the old mate used to put them on the back seat. Now sheep don’t like being carried in the back seat of a car either because they tend to run amok and wet themselves and drop little black pellets everywhere which not only makes the car very messy but it’s difficult to drive when there’s a sheep tearing around the car like a banshee. So he used to tie them up before he put them in the back seat and at least that confined the black pellets to the back of the car.

Now the little black pellets and dust and mud off his gumboots including the undiscovered trace elements and fertiliser and pasture and vegetable seed and corn seed that overflowed from various bags accumulated on the floor in the back of the EH Holden sedan until after twenty years there was a rich layer of compost about a foot deep just waiting for a spark of life to get it going.

That spark of life came on a hot sultry day one November when a massive thunderstorm gathered over the mountains of Tasmania. It silently crept down towards the no horse town oblivious to everyone below and gathering strength all the way until it was smack-bang over the centre of the town. The old mate was having a siesta under a gum tree when the first bolt of lightning struck followed by the loudest clap of thunder ever recorded in a no-horse-town anywhere. The bolt of lightning hit the old mate’s car fair in the centre. It shattered all the windows, melted the tyres and blew the radio out of the dashboard, through the now vacant windows; clear across several paddocks where it landed in old Grandma Smith’s garden and sliced through a row of Brussel Sprouts. Grandma Smith who was asleep at the time, who was as deaf as a post anyway, never heard the thunder and slept on insensible to the whole fandango. Days later when she eventually found the radio lying beneath her mangled Brussel Sprouts, which had become a singed box of valves and tangled wires, she promptly blamed it on the UFO’s that she had been seeing regularly in the village over the past few years. It was that sort of village...

 

The life creating power of a huge cumulo-nimbus storm cloud capable of obliterating a EH Holden.

Moving on… a split nano-second after the lightning came a drenching downpour that filled the creek to overflowing and tore away the only bridge in the town making it not only a no horse town but also a no-bridge-town. It drenched the old mate’s car through the holes that were once windows. The seats were so soggy he couldn’t sit on them for a week.

Anyway, anyway, anyway… while the lightning was tearing around the car blowing out windows and vaporising the radio it also sent several million volts through the pile of compost that lay a foot deep on the back floor… that layer of compost was the closest thing to a primeval swamp since the beginning of time. And so it transpired, unknown to everyone, that the combination of primeval swamp, secret trace elements, rain and a few billion volts started a new form of life… it was a kind of amoeba looking thing with two heads.

 

Fire cloud over the Tasmanian World Heritage area in the 1980's.

Anyway life pretty much returned to normal in the no-horse and no-bridge town except that unbeknown to all ten residents that steadily reproducing in the back of the old mate’s EH Holden sedan was this new form of life. What they did notice however was that the seeds that had lain dormant in the compost waiting for the first flush of moisture began to germinate. Soon there was young corn, cabbages as well as a couple of spuds sprouting in the back of the car. The corn grew so healthily that it was soon growing out of the glass-less windows and grew so tall that when the old mate drove his car it looked like a mobile biodynamic green grocery. The old mate could now get his lunch out on his farm over the hill by simply picking a few corncobs and boiling them in his billy.

It was a matter of the purist coincidence that when the corn was at the peak of its productive capacity he took his annual trip to the coast to do some fishing. He had barely got to the little seaside town that he got pulled over by the cops for driving an unregistered vegetable garden.

Moving on… also by shear coincidence the old bloke just happened to have a beachside shack beside the lady scientist in question and in a spirit of generosity he offered her some of he vegetables that were growing out he windows of his EH Holden sedan including some of the heads of corn.

When the lady scientist was about to throw the corncobs into boiling water she noticed this unusual growth around part of the corncob. Being a good scientist she stopped what she was doing and examined the growth. To cut a long storey short she discovered that this growth was infact a large colony of these two-headed amoeba-like-things that bore no resemblance to any other form of life on earth.

Everything about them was completely different down to the smallest detail of their physiology. She had discovered a new form of life! This was without doubt a ticket straight to a Nobel Prize.

 

The tree of life... or should it be a hedge?

It is hardly surprising that the results of her discovery have been poo-poohed. It is even more certain that she’ll get the lead-balloon award as she has suggested that it’s a ridiculous notion that life on earth began on just one momentous occasion and all life sprang from that one happening. If conditions were right in one place, they’d be fine everywhere else and new forms of life would be, as Snow Patrol sang, …bursting into life… all over the show. And so, there can’t be a tree of life, more likely it’s a hedge and there are new hedges growing all the time.

All we just need to do is wait around for a couple of million years for evolution to provide a whole suite of new bird-like creatures so we can add a whole raft of new “ticks” to our bird lists…. must make some space in my note book…

 

The old mate's bull... not the only bull...

The old mate when told of this momentous discovery said it sounded like a lot of damn nonsense, bordering on claptrap, hogwash, bunk, and the result of guzzling too much moonshine…

Good Weather For Ducks

The old mate was sitting at a bar in a pub in the outback next to a billabong trying to escape the heat and the flies and the hotness. Because he was by himself there was nobody to talk to because there was nobody else in the bar other than the barman who was as cantankerous as a duck with no corn. Anyway another bloke moseyed in to duck the heat and the flies and the scorching heat and got a beer and sat down next to the old mate and started to discuss duck shooting as you do on a red-hot day in the outback when there are flies everywhere including in your beer, up your nose and in your eyes.

Knock the old mate down with a feather but no sooner had they mentioned duck shooting than in walked a duck, which waddled up to the bar and asked the barman for some corn. The barman bawled at the top of his voice, “We have no corn, get out of here.” The duck looked pained but leaves. Ten minutes later the same duck is back and asks for corn. The barman shakes his fist at the duck and bellows, “This is not a bloody green grocers, it’s a pub, I just told you, we don’t have any corn, now get out and stay out!”

Ten minutes later the persistent duck is back and asks for corn. The barman is about to burst a blood vessel “I’m sick and tired of youse ducks coming in here asking for corn. Ask me one more time and I’ll nail your bloody webbed feet to the wooden picnic table by the billabong!”

Several hours goes by and the duck is back and asks, “Do you have any nails?” The barman has a quick look up for divine intervention and when that’s not forthcoming replies, “This is not a bloody hardware shop, no we don’t have nails.” The duck says, “Good, can I have some corn.”

 

Pacific Black Duck... loves corn on the cob smothered in duck fat... oops!

I grew up thinking ducks had a total irrational desire to revel in diabolical weather. On mornings when the clouds were dark and forbidding and were so low they were cloaking the top of the trees; the rain was driving down in bucketful’s and only Garbo’s and Eskimos would venture outdoors the old mate would say “Good weather for ducks.” I thought either the old mate or the ducks, or both, had a few kangaroos loose in their top paddocks to relish such appalling conditions.

It was only after I took up duck shooting that I realized what the old mate should have said was, “Good weather for duck shooting” as the low cloud would keep the ducks low enough to shoot easily… poor ducks!

Since then I have felt so compassionate for the fate of the world’s hapless ducks that not only have to endure bad weather but also are easy targets for bloodthirsty duck hunters. Needless to say I took the side of the ducks and only shot them on fine days when at least they had a chance.

One morning I woke up to a clap of thunder, or it might have been the old mate shooting ducks out the bedroom window, but it caused me to have a duck epiphany and now can barely look at a duck without bursting into inconsolable weeping for all the ducks I have turned into ex-ducks not to mention eaten with roast potatoes, green peas, carrots and drizzled with a red wine gravy.

 

Terns killed on an isolated runway in the Kimberley on one take-off by a light twin engined aircraft. Obviously air travel should be banned and we all go by ship in future! 

So, I produced my personal duck manifesto and I include it for your perusal and adoption…

1. Thou shall not go duck shooting… ducks suffer terribly when shot.
2. Thou shall not go to Chinese restaurants that serve Peking Duck or use fish sauce because of the unrelenting assassination of ducks and fish.
3. Thou shall not eat steak, bacon, lamb chops, or any other meat… except meat bought from a supermarket as it doesn’t come from animals but comes from an undisclosed meat place in the ether that doesn’t involve torment.
4. Thou shall not go fishing… fish suffer discomfort when hooked and dragged to the surface… and because you cannot see what you’re catching you may inadvertently catch an endangered species such as a Loch Ness Monster. Commercial fishing is totally banned except those fishermen that catch fish fingers.
5. Thou shall not have improper hunting thoughts for animals on the official “Cute List” such as whales, Orang Outangs, Pandas, Elephants or any other animals that appear on TV chat shows.
6. Thou shall not allow your children or grand children to watch movies such as “Shrek” or “Finding Nemo” that promote cute little birds exploding or clown fish being eaten by a Barracouta… Remember what Bruce the Great White said “Fish are friends… not food”
7. Thou shall not fly in jet planes… planes have bird strikes… how would you like to be sucked into a jet engine, instantly shredded, immolated and spat out as fried bird dust…
8. Thou shall not drive a car… cars kill birds, as do trucks, trains, bicycles and formula one racing cars. Walking is acceptable but don’t tread on ants except those annoying little black ones that deserve to be stood on.
9. Thou shall not produce electricity via sustainable methods… wind farms are absolutely murderous to Orange-bellied Parrots.

    10.  Thou shall not go bird watching.

1.    Thou shall not use audio recording to attract birds so you can get a tick on your frivolous list of birds in case they are eaten by a eagle-eyed raptor… raptors need re-educating to stop killing birds also… talk to Bruce.
2. Thou shall not trample about in the bush, beach, desert etc. scaring birds off their nests, scattering young and causing untold bird mortality and wrecking havoc on an otherwise pristine environment.
3. Thou shall not trespass on land that is not yours even if Princess Parrots are there.
4. Thou shall not go on pelagic bird watching trips due to the insensitive nature of pelagic bird watchers who artificially feed birds thereby creating an unsustainable dependence on people for their food supply and then abandoning them into an unknown future of want as well as artificially destroying the natural balance of the ocean.
5. Thou shall not photograph birds without their permission.
6. Thou shall clean up your own back yard before…

Duck hunting dissidents examining duck friendly transport... the future of travel only you can't whip the horse.

 

The Jumping Frog in the Outback

Now you might think that the Outback is crammed full of desert things like sand and more sand and mulga and spinifex and more sand and bull dust and flies and not a lot else and certainly not much in the way of water or frogs. But you’d be surprised just how much water there is out there and how many frogs.

Anyway, the old mate found a frog jumping around his campsite in the Outback and having just cooked himself a large steak on the campfire decided not to eat it… the frog that is.

His campsite was beside a creek that explains why the frog was there despite being in the Outback that rightfully shouldn’t have frogs due to the lack of water and over abundance of sand, bull dust, flies and more bull dust, etc.

The Murchison River, Western Australia, a series of water holes in the desert.

Anyway… the old mate reckoned this frog seemed to be the Eddie-the-Eagle among long-jumping frogs, so he caught him and put him in a box and called him Freddy… Freddy-the-eagle.

Now the Outback would have to be frog-paradise based on the number of flies hanging doing nothing except for getting in peoples eyes and ears and up their noses and on their lunch and in their beer and hiding in the car and generally driving everyone to distraction.

All a person needs to do is stick out its tongue and a fly will land on it… so it’s the same with frogs. The only difference is while a frog relishes a fly, a person, on swallowing a fly, usually chokes and spits it out and goes green and tries to throw up.

Anyway, anyway, anyway… Freddy turned out to be the Joe DiMaggio of the frog world and could out-jump any frog or frog like thing and won all sorts of amateur frog jumping competitions… well one actually. So the old mate decided to make Freddy a professional but unfortunately there was no professional circuit for jumping frogs and no sponsorship deals and tee-shirts and running shoes with frogs on them wouldn’t sell.

One day, while sitting in a pub in the Outback the old mate was telling the only other bloke in the pub about his Freddy and his astronomical jumping ability and how Freddy could out-jump any frog on the planet. So the other bloke asked to see this remarkable frog and Freddy was fetched into the pub where he jumped around the floor being useful by catching the flies.

The other bloke reckoned rather unsportingly that Freddy didn’t seem any better at jumping than any other frog he had seen and furthermore if he had a frog he’d be willing to bet a hundred dollars that his frog could outjump Freddy and then went so far as to suggest that any old common-or-garden frog could out jump Freddy but as he didn’t have a frog on him he couldn’t enter into the bet to prove it.

The other bloke’s insinuation at Freddy’s lack lustre jumping ability irritated the old mate and he was even more fractious at the contention that his ability to judge what amounted to a good jumping frog and what didn’t was being called into question. And a hundred dollars was a lot of money and far more than he had ever bet on anything, even the Birdsville Cup. But when you are riled up and pissed and getting annoyed and your reputation is at stake you tend to do things that in the cold light of day and less beers that maybe you shouldn’t.

And a sort of uneasy silence descended on the pub…

And it just so happened that this outback pub was beside a billabong and it had rained several years ago up north and so the billabong was still half full of water and fully full of frogs and this got the old mate to thinking that this maybe was the opportunity he needed to start off Freddy’s professional career as a frog jumper as well as show this other bloke who knew his frogs and who didn’t.

So he said to this doubting stranger… “Mate”, he says, “just look after me frog and I’ll go out to the billabong and catch you a frog and I’ll take you up on your bet that Freddy can out jump your frog for a hundrid dollars”.

The Cooper Creek flows through the desert on the eastern side of Australia. Banjo Paterson Country and the best cattle grazing country in the world.

So the old mate sloshes around in the billabong avoiding the snakes and beer cans and car tyres and other serpents and eventually catches a frog.

While the old mate is staggering around in the billabong trying to catch a frog the other bloke picks up Freddy and has a look at him. He then takes a 12-gauge shotgun cartridge out of his pocket; prises open Freddy’s mouth and pours in the lead pellets from the shotgun cartridge until Freddy has swallowed the lot and then puts him back of the floor.

The old mate returns to the bar with a wild frog and he sets him down beside Freddy to start the competition.

The wild frog and Freddy just sit there idly and instead of jumping just engage in frog talk. So the other bloke gives his frog a poke in the bum and the wild frog does a gigantic leap, clear over a sleeping dingo and lands in the doorway.

Freddy just sits there.  His leg muscles are twitching and he is straining and trying to jump, but his belly’s just stuck to the floor like a suction cup and in the end he just gives up and remains where he is. Freddy gets a poke in the bum and some exhortations to show that wild frog a thing or two, but to no avail. Freddy remains firmly fixed on the spot. The old mate scratches his head for a while and after some more head scratching and half a beer reluctantly gives the other bloke the hundred dollars. And the other bloke takes it and says “Be back soon, I’ll just return me frog to the billabong”, and he goes out the door taking his hat.

Next thing the old mate hears a Ute start up and drive away. So while he’s waiting for the other bloke to come back he picks up Freddy to see why he wouldn’t jump. “Crikey”, he says to no one in particular as you do when you’re in the Outback and nobody is around, “Freddy weighs twice his normal weight.” And with that Freddy opens his mouth and throws up a pile of lead pellets.

The old mate runs out the door of the pub to catch the beggar who’s done him. The other bloke is nowhere to be seen but in the distance he can see the cloud of dust billowing up behind the departing Ute.

Any poor old Freddy died later that week of suspected lead poisoning.

Now, if you think you’ve heard this story before you’re probably right. Mark Twain published it a hundred years ago, but he stole from an unknown author about two thousand years before. And lets face it… a frog story is a good story no matter how old it is and how many times it’s been told.

 

 

 

The Worst Day in the Life of Iron-girder Smith.

This is a true story that was told to me by a bloke at the Maree Pub. Maree is at the southern end of the Birdsville Track and on a hot day which is most of the year there are more bush flies about than there are feathers on a mob of cold Emus.

I have retold it here word for word except to modify slight historical inaccuracies and for any bits I forgot. This bloke was a retired something important sounding but what sort of important I didn't catch because one of those persistent little bush flies flew into my ear and I couldn't hear a thing until I fished it out. Anyway he had given up city life to find himself in the outback. By that stage the story had begun and afterwards the important bloke got in an altercation and was thrown out into the heat of the day or was it at night.

One of the blokes listening reckoned later that this important bloke was the biggest liar north of Adelaide, but the others refuted this - they reckoned he was the biggest liar north of the Antarctic Ice Shelf and about as useful.

Anyway this is how he told it: This unlucky bloke's name was Iron-girder Smith - "Rusty" as he was known to his mates not that he had any. He was born the moment the Saint Kilda Football Team lost the Grand Final and had they won his mother was going to give him the first names of the entire football team, coaches and runners. He would have had six Jason's, three Tom's, four Aaron's and a Gertrude, among others. Gertie, incidentally was a runner!

Inconveniently he had timed his arrival into the world on Grand Final day and his mother insisted on a home birth so at least, if she was going to miss going to the actual match she could watch the game on the tele, as she couldn't bear the thought of missing such a momentous occasion. He was a difficult delivery but apparently shot out like a cork from a champagne bottle when the opposition, having been behind all the way through, kicked the winning goal in the final few seconds of the match.

Anyway, his mum was a nuclear physicist and his father was a garbo. A garbo is the vernacular for a garbage collector. Garbo's were really the ballet dancers of the street in those days; his dad would run along the street early in the pre-dawn fog and without pausing, grab a bin, remove the lid and in one fluid movement toss it in the air over the tops of parked cars and sleeping drunks where it would be caught in mid-air by his mate standing on the back of the garbage truck. His mate would up-end the bin into the waiting chute and throw it back to Rusty's dad who would catch it and in an effortless pirouette place the lid back on the bin and place the whole shebang on the ground. Often one full bin would pass an empty one in mid-air on its return journey to the street. This was best watched in slow motion while listening to Swan Lake or the Nutcracker suite.

 Randwick City in Sydney fortunately still have Garbo's - keeping the art of garbology alive!

From his earliest days he wished to be a garbo or a light house keeper. Sadly both jobs have almost disappeared having been automated allegedly being more beneficial to society for machines to do things rather than actual people. Having been thwarted by technology in the two main aspirations of his young life he decided to hit back at the world by becoming the assistant manager in a small computer repair company. The boss was the owner and manager, the assistant manager (the person who did most of the repairing - damage) was Rusty, and the wife of the manager was the office lady and the real boss.

The Lighthouse keepers house on South Neptune Island, South Australia. Now sadly empty!

Anyway, anyway, anyway; back to the worst day of his life. It all began normally enough with him sleeping through his alarm. When he eventually woke-up and realised how late he was he threw on his clothes (conveniently lying on the floor beside his bed), dashed out the door without bothering to have breakfast to drive to work. Unfortunately his car's battery was flat which he had been meaning to get fixed for a while. So he decided to ride his push bike and after pumping up both tyres, once of course he had found the pump which was somehow in the dog kennel, he set off at a speedy clip.

His route to work took him past one of those fast food outlets that I won't mention the name of for fear of being sued. However, he went through the drive thru' collected his breakfast and continued down the busy road going faster than the traffic which was crawling along as though in a grid-locked parking lot. Things at this stage were going well - he was eating his hash browns with his left hand and with his right hand holding the handle bar and his coffee at the same time and steering along the road - sort of multi-tasking. That was until his mobile phone rang. In order to get to his mobile phone he rode along with no hands, as you do. However, the front wheel ran over a man-hole (person-hole) cover which caused an unexpected diversion from track. While reaching for the handle bars to correct this slight aberration he unfortunately dropped his coffee which promptly landed on his ankle severely scalding his foot. This caused him to fall off his bike and skid along the road on his face and totally ruining his hash browns.

When he came to an eventual stop the phone was still ringing so he answered it while hopping about on one foot in agony. Fortunately there was a large puddle close by and he cooled off his foot by soaking it and his shoe in the water. The phone call was from the bank saying that this was the last and final warning and that if he didn't pay his credit card by lunch time they would cut it off. Banks of course have no patience. Scarcely had he finished talking to the bank than the phone rang again. This time it was the mobile phone company saying that this was the last and final warning and that if he didn't pay his phone bill they would cut it off. What the heck he thought, so he paid them on the spot with his credit card.

Having collected the remains of his breakfast he continued painfully but overcoming all adversity towards the city. When he arrived at work, late, he found neither the boss nor the boss's wife were there anyway. He had not reached sufficient responsibility to have his own door key and so after waiting a while for them to arrive he got in via the fire escape.

After a considerable time he eventually convinced the police that he worked there. Convincing them was not assisted by the blood all over his unshaven face and one wet and muddy shoe. The bosses didn't turn up all day so he spent the rest of the day doing all three jobs which mostly consisted of trying to placate angry customers who had been waiting for their computers most of which had gone up in smoke in the workshop while he was trying to repair them.

When he eventually climbed out the fire escape to go home he found that some unprincipled rascal had stolen his bike. As he had run out of cash and his credit card had been permanently annihilated by the bank he decided to walk (hobble) home and by this stage the temperature was well into the forties (celsius). He decided to take a short cut and his hobble took him across some parkland which had been left more or less in a natural state having been overlooked by developers. There were tall trees and small shrubs and birds singing in the branches. He'd never been through this park before. After such a day, he began to muse that there was more to life than city buildings, roads, cars and computers as here hidden away (from him anyway... and the developers) was nature in all its glory. This was surely as message in a day of messages.

The Red Gum. My favourite tree... just don't camp under them! 

Now Red Gums are magnificent, majestic trees. Their one disadvantage is that on really hot days they are prone to drop extremely large branches with a sudden bang. Just as he walked under the largest Red Gum in the park there was a loud crack; a huge branch broke off up high in the canopy and fell on him and he was killed instantly.

This is the point where one of the blokes in the bar started questioning the veracity of the whole story and whether this bloke was as important as he reckoned he was and whether he was having a lend of us all… and then the important bloke got thrown out of the pub.

Don't you see the point... the important bloke shouted as he was being dragged out the door; Rusty is more or less a typical modern person and city dweller. He lives a life where man is the creator of everything in his world. He starts his day sleeping in a man-made bed in a man-made room; drives his car down paved streets breathing air-conditioned air and listening to man-made music. The few gardens and trees that he passes are cultivated. He works in a man-made office totally surrounded by man-made stuff. He eats processed food that has no connection with its living origins. Even his recreation is all man-made in man-made surroundings. Each day ends asleep back in a man-made bed or the man-made sofa in front of the man-made TV.

Man, to his experience, is not only totally responsible for everything that he does, but also has an explanation for everything. There are no mysteries. He has never in his short life stared up at the stars and wondered. The one time he consciously thought about nature it was too late...

The Outhouse With the World's Best View.

Frank Lloyd Wright would be impressed with the breathtakingly simple and user friendly filing system I'm in the process of designing and building for my office at home. This process which I began 15 years ago, although some less charitable would suggest I started it about the time of Marcus Agrippa (a famous roman tennis racket handle designer). Incidentally, it was the time we moved into our present house and it is progressing steadily.

Others, not looking at anyone, accuse me of lackadaisical filing and loosing stuff and are forever ringing me up asking where things are. The fault is not mine. I believe it is my dog Bella who gets out of her kennel in the dark of night, unclips her chain, unlocks the door, comes into her office (the location of her day bed), hides everyfing and disappears. I have noticed that when I untie her in the morning she gives me one of those smug dog like smiles as if large bones wouldn't melt in her mouth.

So you can appreciate that I am well qualified to build a bird hide. Now for those of you who don't know much about bird watching, a bird hide, despite its name, is not a place where you hide birds. It's a place where you hide yourself. So it's a good idea to write a note when you hide in a bird hide in case you forget where you hid yourself. Just like my filing system.

Anyway, I thought it would be a good idea to look around to see what other peoples bird hides looked like before I built my own. It just so happened that I went south of Adelaide looking for albatrosses that are often blown close to the coast when there are strong south west winds such as we have been having lately. Knock me down with a feather but when I got there I found a bird hide over looking the sea. It had wide sweeping views across the ocean towards Kangaroo Island. It was a bit on the small side, but in bird hides as in real estate... location, location, location.

Overlooking the Investigator Straits between the Fleurieu Peninsular and Kangaroo Island.

When I went inside I realised this was a dual purpose bird hide. 

Anyway, I was sitting in the bird hide and instead of watching albatrosses, because there wasn't any, I was contemplating what bird I would be if in my next life if I had to come back as a bird. However, being a bird these days is a risky business. Despite, at the time, being rather cross at all albatrosses for not putting on a flying demo in front of the bird hide, I would probably say an albatross. Gliding around the oceans effortlessly, living on calamari, and seeing most of the world, the southern half of the world anyway, seems like not a bad choice.

Black-browed Albatross - taken from the Sandra K - Pelagic Trip with SOSSA (Southern Oceans Seabird Study Association) Wollongong, NSW.

These days just being an albatross and doing what albatrosses do - eating food from the surface of the sea, would be like playing Russian roulette every breakfast, lunch and dinner. In the quest to completely eradicate all fish from the sea fisherman use a fishing technique called long lining. Huge lines kilometers long with baited hooks every few meters that float along the surface.

Sea birds including albatross see the baits and dive into the sea to catch them, get hooked and drown. In their hundreds of thousands every year. Maybe I won't be an albatross.

Maybe there is safety in numbers; if I came back as one member of the most numerous bird species on earth there would have to be a good chance of surviving. Not so if I was writing this early last century and chose to come back as a Passenger Pigeon. The Passenger Pigeon lived in North America and in the eighteenth century had an estimated population of 3 to 5 billion individuals. By 1915 they had become totally extinct from shooting and habitat degradation. Maybe I wont be a passenger pigeon.

Welcome Swallow - Fleurieu Peninsular.

Maybe I'll just be a Welcome Swallow or Scarlet Robin.

Scarlet Robin - Fleurieu Peninsular.

The Day the Sky Turned Orange

Pilots love to go flying. Most of them anyway. Some pilots are like seagulls - they eat garbage - you thought I was going to say "you have to throw stones at them to get them airborne" - that is an old joke and has no place here.

As I was saying - pilots like to go flying and buzz around the sky all day enjoying themselves but things get in the way such as someone has to pay for all that fun and it's not me. Mostly what stops them is just the weather, or darkness or dark weather. Some times it the wind, now and then fog, then on some occasions it's being under the weather.

If there's too much wind it either something they've eaten or it's too windy to get there - headwinds and sometimes turbulence. I've even been grounded by smoke.

Needless to say, on rare occasions some pilots do not want to go flying such as it's Friday the 13th - not that pilots are superstitious, or important aeronautical occasions such as there is free beer. Then they show the breadth of their true imaginative skills in dreaming up the most pathetically innovative excuses why it would be unbelievably dangerous to even consider getting out of the chair they are sitting in let alone going flying.

The other day in NSW no excuses were needed. The wind huffed and puffed and puffed and huffed and blew red dust all over the place. It came from the interior of Australia in a huge cloud that eventually ended up in New Zealand. The red dust combined with an early morning sun to turn the sky into a glowing orange fog.

Here at Bankstown it was eerily quiet. All aircraft remained parked and the air traffic controllers sat in the control tower with no-one to talk to.

Dear Mr and Mrs Koolabong

Dear Mr and Mrs Koolabong

I am most impressed with your front gate.

Grandkids, flingelbiffers and dogs have never seen rain, not until recently anyway, so explaining to them how water comes out the clouds and wets everybody is difficult. My old dog Bella believes everything I tell her, but the grandkids no longer just look at me in disbelief when I tell them something that defies their world view; they now tell me I'm talking nonsense. Smart kids.

Anyway, the other day  when I was walking through town, the clouds opened up and it rained cats and dogs; children fled and hid behind their mothers skirts. I fledded also not having a raincoat or an umbrella, into this large apparently deserted building to shelter.

Raining Cats & Dogs

Now, apart from a pile of scrap metal in one corner and a solitary chair right in the middle of the large room that I had entered, it was empty. It was obvious had you seen it, that whoever owned this room had cleared it out, apart from the scrap metal and the chair because the walls had been smeared with paint as if a demented contrabulatory scrutentafen... recently castrated bull, had gone berserk in a paint shop.

So I sat on the lone chair and waited for the rain to stop. Presently a very official looking person arrived, no doubt to throw me out for trespassing. However, she, pleasantly, asked me if she could be of assistance.

No, I said, I am merely waiting for the rain to stop. Oh, she said, looking at me disapprovingly. An awkward silence followed. To break the silence I asked how they were going to clean up the mess on the walls.

This produced rather thin lips as she explained that this building was an art gallery and these beautiful brintillagits were the work of one of the leading painters in the region. Another awkward silence followed, only this time longer and colder as we looked at one another.

At this stage I changed feet. I have a mate, I said trying to make amends and improve the tone of the moment, who could get rid of all that scrap metal, he might even pay you something for it. Off course it is a sculpture, how silly of me.

About this time the rain stopped.

Australia is a land of hugenitous flat bits with lumpy bits scattered around the edges and various other spots. One of those flat bits is the Hay Plains. On the southern edge of the Hay Plains is a town called Moulamein and on the eastern edge of Moulamein on the road to nowhere in particular is a gate that leads to a farm house.

Now farms (also called stations, runs, properties and financial black holes) have names because they don't have street numbers or even streets; so in order for Postman Pat and others to find the place the people in the bush display the property's name at the gate, usually on the mail box. Old cream cans make great mail boxes, so do tyres, crankshafts and Coolabah stumps... in fact anything suitable you can find amongst the mountains of useful stuff kept for future use around the back of the woolshed.

Anyway, this particular farm has solved the problems of storing all that useful stuff and at the same time having a farm name at the front gate and a place for birds to roost. And, in the process creating a sculpture far exceeding those piles of scrap that lie around in many of our art galleries that we spend our taxes on.

Koolabong Front Gate

Keep up the good work.

Tops Birds & Everyfing

Mega-Stomachs, Mega-planes and Mega-Podes

If I was to mention that I had been to Gluepot Station you would more than likely think that I had been on a fantasy journey to the Island of Sodor with the grandkids to meet Thomas the Tank Engine and his friends including the mega-stomached Fat Controller and Thomas’s two inseparable and probably gay carriages; Annie and Clarabel. I’m sure you can picture me and the grandkids bumping along a branch line with Thomas, Annie and Clarabel to Gluepot Station where we disembark and promptly glue cut-outs in a pot. Very useful!

If Thomas had been written today you couldn’t write the fat part of the Fat Controller. So I will not mention the word f.t again even when referring to the Fat Controller. So even though the Fat Controller may from time to time slip out, unintentional like, as a person from now on whenever I mention the Fat Controller in public, I shall substitute, instead of the Fat Controller; the nattily dressed and bossy controller of railways whose skin is too far apart. He, the owner of a mega stomach. His belly button is too far from his distal plane. Planes are found at airports. 

Singapore Airlines A380 at Sydney International Airport

Now this is a particularly bariatric (i.e. f.t) aeroplane – the Airbus 380 at Sydney Airport – now that’s a mega plane.

The nattily dressed and bossy controller of railways whose skin is too far apart of yesteryear is now more likely to be an airport manager.  Having said that I have yet to see an airport manager dressed in a morning suit and a top hat standing beside the runway calling aeroplanes by their first names and exhorting them to ensure they get away on time and making sure they have enough coal on board for the journey or he, or she, shall brick them into a tunnel.

A Pair of Mallefowl

Anyway, the Gluepot Station I have just returned from is, or more correctly was a cattle station. It is now a conservation reserve especially known for its endangered birds. Birds such as a megapode called the Malleefowl. A less than caring parent, but a great builder; it first digs an enormous pit in the ground – a bit like an open cut coal mine which it fills with leaves and other vegetation. It then covers that with a mound of sand resembling a small Mount Killamanjaro minus the mist and the gorillas. It then uses the heat generated by the composting vegetation to incubate the eggs that it has laid within the mound and thus saving itself the bother of incubating the eggs by sitting on them for hours on end.

However, depending on the weather, the temperature may get too hot and they may end up with hard-boiled Malleefowl chicks, or even too cold for successful incubation. The Malleefowl has to check the temperature each day and either uncover the mound if it’s too hot or cover it up if it’s too cool. By the end of the breeding season the Malleefowl have shifted and re-shifted the equivalent of innumerable truck loads of building materials. 

By the time the eggs are due to hatch the parents are well and truly over the whole process and go on a holiday. The chicks have to dig themselves out from under tonnes of rotting vegetation and sand and arrive at the surface expecting to be greeted by their loving mother and father. They don’t even leave them a note. It’s a well known fact that kids follow their parents bad examples so these chicks will do the same to their chicks – no wonder they’re endangered.

Considering it takes up to six months to build the nest and maintain the whole shebang I wonder if would just be easier to lay the eggs and sit on them like most birds.

A Malleefowl Nest Built on a Bush Track - Reserve Staff Redirected the Track Around the Nest To Protect It. (This photo was taken at the Coorong -another of South Australia's Important Bird Areas)

Anyway, the Malleefowl is called the Malleefowl because it lives in the Mallee. The Mallee is called the Mallee because of bunch of eucalypts species of trees that are called Mallee Trees. Mallee trees are scraggly disorganised trees. Millions of hectares of them were cleared for farmland. Where Gluepot Station is located the land is particularly dry and infertile, which is fortunate because the owners of the station didn’t bother to clear much of the land, they just grazed their few cattle among the mallee trees. Hence the birds had a place to live that more or less resembled their natural habitat.

Now Gluepot is owned by Birds Australia, Australia’s major bird organisation and is managed as a conservation reserve and is open to the public. Camping is permitted. There is only limited facilities but the bush is quiet and peaceful. The stars at night shine out in their glory away from any light pollution.

The Sitella Camping Site - Neighbours not a problem!

Lots of information can be found at the following link. 

http://www.birdsaustralia.com.au/the-organisation/gluepot-reserve.html

Anyway, anyway, anyway, the real reason the station was called Gluepot is because when it rains, which it doesn’t do very often I might add, the land turns to glue.

A Common Bronzewing At Gluepot