Glad you are happy with life.

I am also happy that you seem to be able to enjoy the feral Kookaburra. Why do people keep disrupting the environment for such petty reasons as they like Kookaburras? (Substitute anacondas, buffalo, cats, or any other introduced species you care to dislike out of its place)

For those who don't know, Kookaburras are endemic to eastern Australia as are Rainbow Lorikeets but Perth has plenty of each.

So happy to hear that you are staying in Australia because I so love reading your trip reports. Now that you are there for several more years, I'm sure you will find lots of additional places to explore and it will be happy reading for all of us on this forum.

Nice that you are able to stay put and the uncertainty is behind you. You obviously know how to make the most of your surroundings, and good of you to share your knowledge with others.
We see Kookaburras and rainbow lorikeets almost daily when we stay with our daughter outside Margaret River. So no matter where they come from, or 'belong', they are part of the wonderful fabric of WA for us.

I love kookaburras! We have one that sits just outside our bedroom window on the electricity wire, it poos on the car (what quantity and what do they eat!) and wakes us up sometimes at 5 AM. I still love him/her.

Great to hear you are staying Melnq8. We will have to have a Get together while you are still here!

" they are part of the wonderful fabric of WA for us." Yes and that is fine as long as you don't start lobbying for their protection at the expense of native species. There are a number of hollow nesting Western Australian species under threat from direct competition form these imports. People quickly acclimatise to the new paradigm but the wildlife are not so lucky.

For example, no-one in my home village raises a Cassowary chick for Christmas dinner anymore. Not that I would want them to but they were so common here a 100 years ago that this was a regular practice. The chick would be captured about now and raised with the chooks (chickens). We no longer have Chameleon Geckos in the forests around the village thanks to the feral and wandering cats. This was a large ground dwelling gecko. Sure we had predators here before but the feeding of cats and their wide range of food types allows them to maintain higher population densities than the native predators they have replaced.

Sorry to hijack your thread Mel. I'll now step down from my soapbox unless challenged on the above.

I have had six kookas visiting me lately - sitting on my fence waiting a tid bit. I love kookas. Mel so glad to hear you're with us for a bit longer - maybe a gtg next year?

And I too am so pleased to read you are staying in Perth a couple more years but what a strain the uncertainty of the last few months must have been for you. Will look forward to your continued contributions.
Enjoy the kookie - we used to stay with friends in Warners Bay, Newcastle, and every morning we woke to the exhilirating (to a Kiwi) morning chatter.

Yes, a GTG would be great.

<Why do people keep disrupting the environment for such petty reasons as they like Kookaburras?>

I guess I'm ignorant to the impact of kookaburras, Alan, as I don't understand this comment. I didn't realize they were introduced (from where?) Are Rainbow Lorikeets introduced too?

While I fully appreciate the concern for native species, I find it difficult to reconcile killing off one species for the sake of another. I understand it, I just have trouble accepting it.

Good to hear you are staying. We you still be frequenting NZ to keep us all up to date?

You can train kookaburras to come when called, and with a bit more patience to eat out of your hand.

We would feed "ours" every couple of weeks and they would come when called.

I agree it is not much fun killing things, but I will and do hunt vermin. I will be doing my bit in NZ next year hunting possums. The hunting is great fun, the killing not so much. Last time it was a beautiful starry night,driving around the farm looking at deer and cattle. Then any possum we saw was dispatched.

Great fun for us, great business for the tourist operator (not the only thing they do), good for the farmer, great for the environment, good for the local possum factory, good for India where the meat is sent "for dog food"(I don't fully believe that only dogs eat it). Good the for other possums reducing competition. Good for the 11 possums we sent to possum heaven. Everyone wins.

Pity there is not more recreational conservation here.

Another Hijack for conservation.

Enjoy WA

Yeah, those possums are bad news in NZ. I guess I did my part, I bought some possum nipple and willy warmers as gifts and have a nice possum fur hat.

Hopefully, the visits to NZ will continue Peter, although the trip reports may not. I only managed to get halfway through the latest one before I lost my mojo...permanently it seems. Pretty bad when the writer isn't even interested.

Mel, those birds were introduced from the eastern states.

Peter, there is plenty of recreational conservation here. On the Atherton Tablelands TREAT hold public plantings every weekend from late January till April. I came across a group doing weeding in the Lake Eacham National Park on Wednesday. Every Friday here in Yungaburra locals gather to maintain and extend the series of walking tracks along the creek. They also plant trees and do other environmental conservation measures. Friday morning is also the time for the volunteers to work in the nursery which produces about 30 000 rainforest seedlings each year.

If you mean recreational hunting for conservation purposes I am highly sceptical. As you said the hunting is so much fun. The Pilbara now has feral pigs so the bogans working in the mines can have something to do for recreation and the landholders are spitting chips. This has not been recreation but vandalism.

Hunters under supervision have reduced numbers of ferals in some parks to a level where professionals can wipe them out or keep the population suppressed. I will be very surprised if the New South Wales experiment with hunters in National Parks works. They will claim it does work based on the numbers of animals killed but the ferals are highly successful in large part because of their fecundity. To show that it is of any use it needs to be demonstrated that the feral populations have diminished and the damage they are doing is reduced more than the extra damage to the protected estate the hunters and their vehicles do.

Koalas were introduced to WA from the eastern states too, but I guess they don't count since they're only found in wildlife parks.

There's quite alot of volunteer conservation efforts here in WA too.

I did mean hunting for conservation. Planting trees etc. is not nearly as much fun.

Hunting alone will not eradicate a pest species, that's a given. It is just one of many methods.

The fox bounty seems to be attracting many hunters. Programmes like this, that reward and/or encourage responsible hunters are a positive.

Mel, much of the conservation effort in Australia is done on private lands and or by private individuals. We don't have the tax base for it to be otherwise. The nature of our landscape requires this too if we are to be effective. While benevolence in donations of money is not high in this country I think we do quite well in volunteering.

Mel my definition of feral animals is ones on the loose, not in cages. So in that regards I count domestic animals not restricted to a lead or within their house yard as feral. Therefore also, wildlife parks and their animals do not fall in the category as they are restricted. There is the possibility of escape. Do the suburbs around the Perth Zoo still have populations of Palm Squirrels. We don't need more feral rodents.

I see I did not respond adequately to your implied question about impacts. Kookaburras and rainbow lorikeets are both aggressive nest hole breeders, replacing native species in Western Australia. Kookaburras also eat many small birds, which is fine when they are in normal numbers within their range and the little birds have somewhere to hide. We turn many of our landscapes into poor representations of English parks or African savannahs. Old stags are removed and with them the nesting hollows. Shrubs are removed by stock or for stock in rural areas and in our parks we remove them for public safety so lurkers cannot surprise us. Then add competition for a reduced number of hollows, increased predations and still people wonder what happened to all the beautiful fairy-wrens/Carnaby's Cockatoos they used to see near their homes years ago.

peterSale, "encourage responsible hunters are a positive," .. and of programs which encourage hunters to be responsible? [rhetorical question]

As way of background: I am a serious birdwatcher and also used to hunt a lot. For one calendar year nearly all of my protein came from the wild.

What is the qualification test for duck hunters in Victoria? Don't they get three goes each of twenty seconds to identify the species involved? You don't get twenty seconds on a duck flushed from cover before it is out of range. The test is not good enough and the level of skill is appalling which is why so many endangered species are shot. Not just endangered ducks either but egrets which are all white and black swans which are not nearly in the same size class.

Next time you come up this way contact me and I'll show you people who get quite kick out of their non lethal conservation work. Not trying to convert you but you did say, 'the killing not so much,' so it is possible that satisfaction may last longer. While the adrenaline rush might be missing for you in the activities I listed, I can still satisfy that hunting urge by the monitoring of rare and endangered species; trying to gain an insight into their niche so as to enable their conservation. A skilful hunter has a head start in such activities.

Alan, I fully agree with your definition of feral. I trained as an Environmental Scientist many moons ago.

We do need to train hunters more, no doubt in that. More and more are becoming responsible and/or fewer irresponsible ones are keeping their guns.

I would like to see more hunting like the possum hunting in New Zealand, where hunters are taken by commercially licenced guides to help eradicate vermin. As I said above it is a win for all. I am certainly not for willy nilly types.

New Zealnd also has a a 24 hunt where teams are taken onto farms and give 24hrs to kill as much vermin as possible with great prizes and honour are offered and it is carried out is a supervised manner. Thousands of rabbits, hares etc. are dispatched. Again it will not fully eliminate the vermin but will slow them down a bit.

I too enjoy bird/animal watching and the little hunting I have done makes it easier.

I love the way these threads drift off topic.

Appreciate the info Alan, and I don't know about the Palm Squirrels, never heard of them. I have been spotting the Rainbow Bee Eaters on my morning walk though, I'd not heard of them before last week.

Drifting off topic can be interesting, and in this case, informative and educational.

Aren't the Rainbow Bee Eaters beautiful. I love the way their wings glow bronzed gold when the sun shines through them.

I have thousands of photos of Rainbow Bee Eaters that I took at the Desert Park in Alice Springs in 2010, and then thousands more that I took while on the Yellow Waters sunrise cruise in 2011 with my new camera. Well, maybe a slightly exaggerated number, but I just had to preserve their beautiful colours and tails for myself and to share with others. I was told the length of the tail identifies the sex of the bird, but I can't remember which is which. Regardless of that, they are beautiful birds with beautiful colouring that I feel very lucky to have seen. Although they are reputed to be common throughout Australia in woodland and forest areas these are the only places I have seen them in my many trips to Australia.

And I too find it interesting and often very informative when threads take a temporary deviation.

dottyp the males have the long central tail feathers.

Today my friend took hundreds of photos of a Victoria's Riflebird displaying. Also an exaggeration, it was less than two hundred I am fairly confident. This is a small black bird of paradise which dances for his girlfriends. The black has a velvet sheen on the back, a blue cast on the wings and the throat, nape and tail feather will be teal or sapphire depending on the angle of the light.

Thanks, Alan. Amazing how we photographers of unusual birds just ever-so-slightly exaggerate the quantity of our photos! My nephew, an ornithologist, however, tends to understate the numbers!

Dottyp I was amazed at how accurately some professional wader ornithologists can estimate flocks of over 1 000. Even they tend to underestimate, knowing that they tend to underestimate. But to be within 5% is pretty amazing.

When one said 2 380 of a flock wheeling after a raptor put them up, I thought unpleasant things about him. The total, counted through scopes a species at a time after they landed, was 2 421. While doing this he was also able notice small numbers of wader species which I failed to see despite it being my job to identify all the species and have an idea of rough proportions. I felt redundant.

It is easy. You just count their legs and divide by two.

Me

Glad to hear you're staying a bit longer.

We love having you here.

I thought I had replied to peterSale before. I am sure you are jesting but waders tend to stand on one leg and rest with their head under their wings.

Counting heads would reach a gross underestimation and dividing the number of visible legs by two would be even worse. Counting waders is actually a very advanced visual pattern recognition task.

Alan I was joking. It was actually a paraphrasing of an old joke of a dairy farmer (or sheep farmer) who was asked how many he had in the paddock. When he gave the answer they asked how he had done it so quick. "Simple. I count the legs and divide by four".

Fascinating, information Alan. Much appreciated. It is fascinating how good brains are at doing things we think they should be able to do.

How about - count the number of legs multiply by pi divide by... never mind.

OOPs That should read
It is fascinating how good brains are at doing things we think they should NOT be able to do.

Glad to see the thread lives on.

I'm currently in Colorado; where, Alan will be happy to know, there are no kookaburras (plenty of conservatives though).

.. and other ferals too I bet!

I would love to visit Colorado one day but it wont be next year.

Oh yeah, we've got our share of ferals, particularly of the two-legged variety.

I'm staying near the foothills, and the number of deer I've seen in just two days is pretty amazing. These are suburban deer, unafraid of people. Just today I saw a couple of them crossing a fairly busy street. I love having them so close, but the homeowners whose gardens they eat might disagree. There have been mountain lion and bear sightings up this way too - all within the city limits.

Those native belong and should be accommodated if at all possible not just if it is convenient.

I saw the tail and hind quarter of a mountain lion in the Blue Mountains of Washington State as we drive around a corner on a dirt road it must have left the road, leaping up a very steep bank. A better look would have been great but a friend of mine worked on a project with these animals and did not see one in 9 months. He saw kills, tracks and scats but that is as far as he got.

I see Colorado voted Democrat two times in a row for the first time since the 1932/36 elections.

Given the options, I'm not surprised

I haven't been around much on this board so just saw this one. Glad to know that you are staying in Perth Mel. I hope we will be treated to additional trip reports, as the spirit moves you.

Mel, I remember how badly your home area was hit by fires a few months ago - hope everyone is doing as well as possible. Takes a lot of $/ time & often both to recover & rebuild after such devastation.

Mel, I just saw this and I too am relieved that the uncertainty is now over and that you get to Wait Awhile longer in Perth!

Thank you Bokhara; LOL sassy_cat.

We've had some pretty spectacular weather since I've been in CO - cold, but crisp, sunny and clear, perfect for a bit of hiking. I've just returned from a short trip to Buena Vista, where the mountains, hot tubs and margaritas were lovely.

I saw some of the fire damage on the way home while driving down US Route 24 from Woodland Park to Manitou Springs. This road was closed during the worst of the fire, and some of the businesses there were hit hard by the closures. The fire came awfully close to the road, but oddly enough, it's a bit difficult to spot the fire damage since the trees are devoid of leaves this time of year, and it was such a dry year that many trees have been lost due to lack of water. There's no denying the black sticks though, and the charred remains of homes in Mountain Shadows.

It does my heart good to hear all the touching stories that came from the fires...the overwhelming community assistance makes me proud of my hometown.

Our favorite little cafe in the Dandenongs, just a few minutes from here, as rife with bird life. Rosellas swarm outside the windows until the cockatoos bully them out for a few minutes... and then they're back. But steps from the front door, always favouring the handrail of the front walk is a pair of kookaburras. They've become so used to people walking by, one can approach and could touch them, though we wouldn't, of course. So interesting.

My daughter's prep school has a kookaburra that likes to sit in a large tree over the little schoolhouse and laugh at the kids. Must know something, that one.

I meant to ask Alan if Eclectus Parrots were something he sees in his area? I'm just fascinated by that both genders are brightly marked, but completely different.

---

I didn't catch on until after I posted the age of the thread. Mel, hope you're having a good time in CO, despite the witnessing the aftermath. CO's probably my fav state back home.

No you need to go another 12 hours' drive north of here to see Eclectus Parrots. It would be faster to fly to New Guinea.

Did you know that the male locks the female away in the nest whole once they have mated? Talk about protecting paternity!

On the other hand yesterday I had a Golden Bowerbird come into his bower while I was standing almost in it, explaining his handy work for some English guests. A bit like this bird here but more fiddling with the arrangement. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQU-CpxQUuQ

It would be faster to fly to New Guinea.

I don't think I'd mind doing that at all, now that you mention it.

I forget sometimes how much of Australia is still north of you

Wow, that's some construction project the Bowerbird gets up to. Interesting!

Of all the Aussie birds that first seemed so foreign to me at first, the one that I came to love most was the the sound of the Bell Miner. When I first heard them, they reminded my how far I was from home. Of course, one adapts and joins in and I've come to think of them as the voice of Australia.

I too love the call of Bell Miners. This far north we don't have them but the Spotted Pardalote can sound a bit like them.

Fabulous video Alan.

Oddly enough, I miss the screeching, laughing and cawing of those prolific Aussie birds. I've seen masses of deer, squirrels and prairie dogs, but there just aren't enough colorful and noisy birds here in CO. I DO adore the cooler (and downright cold) weather though...it's going to be quite a shock when I'm plunged into summer on my return to Perth next week.

I took a walk through the fire ravaged neighborhood of Mountain Shadows today. It was sobering, as one might expect. The fire was ruthless, yet merciful, demolishing some homes, yet sparing those right next door. An odd sight indeed.

The affected neighborhoods have made incredible progress in such a short time. Potential erosion is the current concern, but efforts to keep it in check are well underway. Good on ya, Colorado Springs!

Only 19*C in Perth this afternoon. It is even hotter than that on the Tablelands! Here is is 30*C. In Perth next Monday it will be 32 and 34 on Tuesday before cooling down for a few days.

Tomorrow both Hobart and Sydney will be hotter than here in Yungaburra.

Can't wait for the cool change. It was 38 here in Melbourne today.

32, 34, 38....argh!

Anything over 26c is hot to me; 19 sounds pretty good though.

Colorado is having a very weird weather year. They desperately need snow...or rain...or any kind of moisture... but the temps have been barely below freezing at night and into the upper 60's and low 70's by day. Coldest it's been since I've been in town is 9F, which felt pretty good to me, as there was no wind (with wind I'd have frozen my tatas off). I just put on an extra layer and walked for two hours that morning, felt good.

36*C in Brisbane but up here in the tropics 29*C right now. We we have a cool 19 tonight while down south in our subtropical capital it will be a minimum of 22.

Meant to say Mel that at that temperature my ears begin to ache.

That's what fleece hats are for Alan!