Another snake

Snake in the grass

Much excitement up at my in-laws' place in the Blue Mountains at the weekend when Emily stumbled across a beautiful Red-bellied Black Snake in the garden. Although venomous they tend to be pretty placid and so I was quite comfortable getting a nice close look. There's no way I'd be getting as friendly with a Brown Snake or a Tiger.

Up close and personal

This individual was about 1.2m long and very active as it was hunting frogs around the pond which was great to watch.

But the moral of the story is to always charge your camera battery the minute that it runs out! Sadly mine was flat and so I had to rely on a camera phone to get any pictures at all. I'd have done really well if I had my camera as the snake wasn't fussed at all by my presence and stayed in the same area for ages. That doesn't happen very often with snakes in my limited experience.

Oh well, lesson learned and the camera will be fully charged for my trek across the Nullarbor in a couple of weeks time. My parents fly in tomorrow and looking at Flight Radar I see that they've just entered Kazakhstan air-space so things appear to be on track. Still a long way to go though! Let's hope my friendly snake sticks around for a few weeks and we can get some better pictures.

Red belly
    

Finally... A twitch!

It's been a ridiculously long time coming through the endless cold winter but at last a twitch within striking range and a chance for my first tick of the year. Yes indeed, first tick of the year and we're already in August! I've clearly just not been putting the effort in.

Misty morning in Leeton, NSW

One never knows where the twitch will take you and this time the road-trip headed about six and a half hours west into country NSW to the town of Leeton. And to be more precise, the sewage works at Leeton where a Northern Shoveler showed up last Monday. A familiar duck to most of you in the northern hemisphere but a rare vagrant down here.

Historic Leeton Hydro

With Emily texting me positive updates from the online twitching community during the drive over there, confidence was pretty high as I arrived at the poo ponds just after 3pm with a couple of hours of light remaining. Hundreds of ducks filled the ponds including a few nice ones like Blue-billed, Pink-eared, and Musk Ducks but no sign of the shoveler. Not to worry, it had been seen every day since Monday and so off to the hotel ready for an early start on Sunday.

Ducks

The hotel turned out to be a kind of cross between Fawlty Towers and The Shining. In a good yet slightly spooky way! Not having really changed since opening in 1919 the creaky old staircase led up to creepy corridors and rooms with ceilings so high you just assumed they were up there somewhere. Anyway, a place with character and super comfortable for the night.

Geocache in a bird hide

Early Sunday I was back at the ponds with the car thermometer reading 0°C and frost on the ground. As the morning mist cleared the ducks appeared and as time went by their numbers swelled as did the number of twitchers. We had groups looking here there and everywhere throughout the day but the duck that we were all after was never seen and actually hasn't been seen since. I must have missed it by only a couple of hours. Dipped. Gutted.

Up there on the bolt - a magnetic micro-capsule hidden in plain sight

But, then again, maybe not as a few Purple-backed Fairy-wrens #502 hopped into view from the vegetation around the ponds. Recently split from the east coast Variegated Fairy-wren, I was always going to run into them at some point so it may as well have been now. Some small consolation and there was also a little time to grab a couple of geocaches in the nearby Fivebough Swamp bird reserve. Who would have thought it, geocaches in bird hides!

Wombat in Wombat

I also promised to stop at the village of Wombat on the way home and take a picture of the 'famous' wombat-on-a-rock sculpture. With the shoveler putting in a no-show it was a bit dark by the time I passed through Wombat but, even so, I got my picture. It's actually a pretty cute little wombat!