Critters

A couple of interesting critters up in the mountains this weekend. First up, a nice Eastern Blue-tongue lizard. These large skinks try to scare off predators by opening their mouths wide which are bright pink on the inside with a crazy blue tongue. Interesting strategy. Not sure how effective that would actually be though!

Eastern Blue-tongue

Secondly, a White-tailed Spider was roaming around the house one evening. These are nocturnal and interestingly hunt other spiders and, although smaller, they pack a pretty unpleasant and potentially dangerous bite.

White-tailed Spider

When we returned home there was a bit of a larger spider in our own living room. I don't have a picture though as we were too busy 'dealing with it', but we later measured it at just over 10 cm across. Not pleasant.

Sculpture by the Sea

The 15th annual Sculpture by the Sea exhibition was just on the other weekend and I actually popped over to see it this year for the first time. Over 100 sculptures are installed on the coastal path between Bondi and Tamarama. As is the way with sculpture, some was good, some was very bad, and some was just very weird. These are just a few of them...

Good

Bad

Ugly

Weird

Tyre tortoise

Snipe twitch 2

On the trail of the Painted Snipe

In November 2009, Emily and I headed 400km west to Dubbo to find a Painted Snipe that was hanging out in a small temporary pond in a random paddock. When we arrived, however, the pond had dried up the day before and the snipe was gone. But over the last couple of weeks there have suddenly been reports of Painted Snipe all over the place and two of these were from the west of Sydney by Windsor and Richmond. Apparently these birds will appear further east in greater numbers after good inland rains and then promptly disappear again. So no time to lose, especially with a couple of them allegedly right on our doorstep. We certainly weren't going to miss out again so we hooked up with Jarrod and headed out last Sunday. With my eye slowly improving but still very much in the 'dodgy' category, Jarrod's keen sight was required and he didn't let us down getting onto the Painted Snipe #416 as soon as we pulled up at the first of our two possible sites. Too easy!

Too far away for my little camera

In fact the only problem was dodging the hailstones from the angry thunderstorm passing overhead. With the snipe in the bag so quickly we popped up the road to Scheyville NP and that proved to be inspired as we shortly bagged a White-throated Gerygone #417 in the trees by the car-park. A summer visitor to Sydney, they're common enough in the dry woodland in the west of the Sydney basin but have somehow managed to evade me up until now.

Those folks with ridiculously keen attention may notice that these new bird numbers are not in sequence with previous entries. I was just going through my lists and was horrified to find a mistake way back at bird #45 and so almost the whole list has been out by one. All is fixed up now though and still a net gain for the week. Excellent!

The stuff of nightmares