Warm and sticky

It seems to be that time of year now when it's warm but raining all the time so a bit unpleasant to be out. I'm still banned from swimming with my new eye and so I can't even get into the water to cool off. I'm seeing the surgeon again on Tuesday though so maybe I can get the green light to return to the sea.

Damp millipede

The spiders love the warm and damp weather so they're swarming about outside with the odd incursion indoors. We had the fastest individual ever in the house a couple of days back. I timed him on a lap of the living room at about 5 seconds! Tricky to keep up with and tricky to catch.

This one's a little bigger!

Yellow-tailed Black-Cockatoo

We've been out here and there but with minimal walking involved! An unsuccessful twitch for Little Button-quail at Centennial Park and a trip to North Head have been about the limit of my efforts.

The city from North Head

Eastern Water Dragon

On Friday, however, I experienced one of my proudest ever moments. Published on the BBC live cricket commentary! Admittedly it was about 5am in the UK and so only a few expats writing in at that point in time, but my mediocre effort at humour regarding hypothetical cricketer's pubs was deemed worthy of a mention!

You beauty!

Wallaby at Woodford?!

It has long been claimed that kangaroos and wallabies frequent the garden up in Woodford but in all my time spent up in the Mountains, I've never seen so much as a hint of macropod action. In an attempt to prove their existence, Roger just sent me the following picture. Now I'm not inferring anything, but it may be worth bearing in mind at this point that Maria is a bit of an expert when it comes to Photoshop!

Roger in a wallaby suit?

Christmas critters

Happy New Year everyone and all the best for 2012! I hope you all had a good break over the festive period. I spent most of the time sleeping up in the Blue Mountains but I did manage to get out into the garden and surrounding bush for some of the time in search of interesting stuff. I also managed to get out on one fruitless twitch attempting to find Pilotbirds in Winmalee but to no avail. Summer has arrived in Sydney over the past couple of weeks too but despite the odd day with soaring temperatures, I didn't manage to find any snakes. There were a few good critters around though...

Lizards:

Jacky Lizard (Amphibolurus muricatus)

Cunningham's Skink (Egernia cunninghami)

Lots of Eastern Water Skinks (Eulamprus quoyii)

Insects:

Mantis

Stick Insect

Frogs:

Peron's Tree Frog (Litoria peroni)

And the ubiquitous Huntsmen of course:

This one is only size ML (also available in L and XL!)