Capertee Valley

Capertee Valley

The Capertee Valley is a large area of, primarily, farmland hemmed in on its east side by the Wollemi NP. Being in the rain shadow of the Blue Mountains its much drier than other areas so far east and is therefore a top spot for birds more normally found further inland. Its only an easy 3 hour drive from Sydney. Its also one of the few places that the Regent Honeyeater can regularly be seen and is famed for its many finches.

Car camping

Allan, Jarrod and I set out after work on Friday for a bit of car camping. It was the first dry weekend for a while and so my mosquito net was fine on this occasion. The place was swarming with finches, as hoped, and although I missed the rare Plum-headed, I picked up the Diamond Firetail #368 and also White-browed Babbler #369. There were also loads of Little Lorikeet, Bee-Eaters and Hooded Robin which was nice.

Diamond Firetail

Double-barred Finch

Allan isn't one for the birds so much, although I think he's about to cave in and start ticking, so we went for a bit of bush-walking too and ended up scaling the valley wall. Thanks a lot lads. A bit of a hot climb but we did see a smashing 5ft Lace Monitor and a few nice spiders. No snakes though this time.

On top of the valley wall

Redback on the offensive

Whoah!

Lace Monitor hiding up a tree

Simon and Aleisha's wedding

Nothing had been happening since I got back, until last week that is. Everything then kicked off. On Saturday Simon and Aleisha were married and I was honoured to be Best Man. On the Wednesday before, the lads went fishing for the stag do out in the open ocean. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures but we caught a load of huge stuff (honest) and managed to easily fill our large cooler with fish. I was also hoping for a load of good pelagic birds out there as reports have been very good over the past couple of weeks. In the end, however, we only encountered two species of shearwater but at least one of them was new #367 Wedge-tailed Shearwater. A good day was had by most (those throwing up all the time maybe didn't enjoy it so much) although I did get horribly sun-burned but luckily that had mostly gone down by Saturday.

Simon, me and Simon's brother Karl

The weather remarkably cleared for the ceremony

Signing the paperwork

On Saturday the rain cleared an hour before the ceremony so we were able to have it outdoors in the main quad here at the university. The reception was held in the Darbar curry house. Magic!

Reception

Speech time (no photo of me because I'm sure they were all laughing too much to hold a camera steady!)

Citizenship

Well goodness me, I'm Australian. Actually I'm still British as well which is a good thing. I attended the ceremony on Thursday at Sydney Town Hall hosted by the Lord Mayor. It was surprisingly pleasant in the end and I was presented with a jar of vegemite.

Nothing much had happened since I came back to Australia after the Christmas/New Year break as the weather has been just terrible. Hence the deplorable lack of blogging. We've had rain all the time so the drought has finally broken but now everyone is getting flooded instead. What a ridiculous country.