Category: Nature

Water water everywhere

For the last week or so it has been raining in cairns. A lot!

You may have even seen it on the news, with flooded streets and overflowing dams (oh how the residents of Brisbane must be jealous).

I have been finding it fun because I don’t recall the last time I was somewhere that it rained for 4 days straight, and being in the tropics, it has meant that I have been able to go outside in the (warm) rain and jump in puddles and generally exercise my inner child.

There has even been a bit of surface flooding on our lawn, but it’s a pretty sandy base with several drains, so it never gets beyond being a centimetre of water covering everything, and certainly doesn’t come close to flooding our house.

So all things as they are it’s been kind of fun to watch the clouds roll over the hills behind our house looking all grey and rain laden, and a few minutes later to hear the thumping of big fat raindrops on our roof.

Oh, it’s that time of year again

I’m always amused at how quick my brain is to forget why I hate living in Queensland so much, but once again I’ve been reminded: For 6 months a year it’s inhumanly hot here.

It’s just reached the start of those 6 months, and already I’m once again trying to figure how I modify the house so that I can sleep in the fridge.

(And next year we’re moving to Cairns. Sometimes I wonder if I do this to myself on purpose as some sort of punishment for unspecified sins)

Wombat wombling

I was watching this thing on the ABC this afternoon all about a couple of guys who were doing PhDs in the alpine ecology of the Kosciusko National Park area, and they had some really cool footage of all sorts of animals running around in the snow. Kangaroos, Emus, Wombats.

Now wombats look cool enough at the best of times, with their cute little trundling and wombling around, but they really look cute running around in the snow, chewing on the patches of grass sticking through, and drinking from melt streams.

Creepy! Crawley! Bugs are cool!

I’ve been watching the David Attenborough series Life in the Undergrowth, which is all about the fascinating diversity of insects and arachnids (spiders and scorpions) and the evolutionary adaptations that they have developed in order to master all the world – wings, silk, armour, breathing without being in water, breeding without water.

It really is pretty cool the various things they have done in order to fill all the millions of little ecological niches that they occupy.

The whole thing takes me back to my childhood, where we used to watch nature documentaries all the time, which was always a strangely enjoyable family activity, despite the fact that it made me vastly geeky (and by extension in primary school, unpopular).

Formation flying

Today I saw, I think for the first time ever (or the first time I can recall at least) geese flying in a “V”. I’ve always known that they do it, but I haven’t ever seen it except on TV. Now I’ve actually seen it, and it’s pretty cool.

Formation flying

Today I saw, I think for the first time ever (or the first time I can recall at least) geese flying in a “V”. I’ve always known that they do it, but I haven’t ever seen it except on TV. Now I’ve actually seen it, and it’s pretty cool.

Don’t eat the funny coloured mushrooms

It’s been raining quite a bit recently (for brisbane in April at least), and today as I was walking out to hang out the laundry (which reminds me of another story I may regail you with later*) and I noticed that there were all these blue mushrooms growing around the clothes line. Having not previously seen blue mushrooms I began wondering what they were and what caused them to have their peculiar color. Perhaps, being underneath the washing line, they were benefiting from drips containing some of the stuff that makes up the little blue granules that you see in washing powder (apparently blue makes whites look whiter..?..??….(Although presumably this would mean that the mushrooms should be an iridescent white, rather than blue)). Just a theory anyway (even if it is a patently silly one).

Then on the way back into the house later in the day, I noticed that there were some yellow mushrooms growing near our front room, and I don’t even want to think about what could have given them their color…

* Simone was commenting the other day that she couldn’t remember the last time she had done laundry. Obviously I’ve been being a good little house bitch (and presumably a correspondingly a bad little med student).