Thursday March 3

I certainly have gone to the flip side of winter.  Today is supposed to get up to 90 degrees here and the humidity is to reach 95%.  It is the antithesis of the winter weather that I left.  No more cold and snow for me...  :)

I was treated to a wonderful nature display yesterday afternoon.  It was a rainy afternoon which lent itself to a nice relaxing sedentary pace.  We sat out on the front porch of our hosts, Simon and Janice's home.  It over looks the Boyne River and a nature preserve on the mainland.  There was a parade of birds that flew by as we took in the new experience and scenery.  There was a really cool serenade from a set of kookaburras that was a unique sound.  It was a tropical sound that brought home the thought that I am not in Kansas anymore...

There were birds of different colors, bright green with red under bellies, yellow ones, fat ones, slow ones and fast ones.  They have such a great front row seat to a nature show.  Then there were the magpies.  These birds which as our host described could be a very aggressive bird also gave us a great song to hear.  The aggressive part though was stressed.  In the times when the magpies have young ones in the nest they will dive down at passerby's to chase them off.  But not just to chase you off.  They will dive at you with the intent of pecking your eye out.  Now that is a bird to give some space to.  As a friend said...  Australia is not for the faint of heart.  Even the birds have an edge to them.

Speaking of birds, at dusk I saw a large number of "birds" begin to rise up out of the nature preserve across the river.  They started out as a couple of fairly large birds taking flight.  Then it went from a couple to a couple of hundred and then possibly a thousand or more.  They started to gain altitude and then congregate in a circular pattern over the trees.  Shortly there after they began to leave the preserve and fly out in all directions across the landscape.  They were large in size, some with wing spans the size of hawks or better.  As they flew overhead I noticed a peculiar shape to them.  They were not birds at all but bats!  Or as I was corrected to understand, flying foxes.  Their size was enormous.  The sound they made was rather eerie.  

In all, yesterday was a great aviary display of the uniqueness of Australia.  A great day of leisurely observation.

Here is where I currently am:

Boyne Island just south of Gladstone.

One of the beautiful flowers that I have seen.