Michelle and I rose early this morning – 4am – because we had a big project for today: surveying 13 kilometers of the Fitzroy River for Fairy-Wrens, by canoe. Julie drove us out to Sir John Gorge in predawn darkness and paused there just long enough to see us drag the canoe down the rocky […]
As I walked up to my room this evening, just after sunset, a crowd of half a dozen people were gathered just outside my door. I opened my mouth to ask what was going on, but, just then, Ben arrived on a quad, screeching to a halt in a cloud of dust, and jumped lightly […]
“Don’t add the yeast with the boiling water, or you’ll kill it,” said Richie Rich this afternoon (a nickname derived from the unfortunate coalescence of four different Riches at Mornington, after they all declined to be known as “Richard the First,” “Richard the Second,” and so on). “There are many ways to bugger a brew.” […]
Not that I’m obsessive about the heat, but here are a few benchmarks I’ve noticed lately: (1) Afternoon high temperatures are usually near 107 F (41.5 C) and don’t vary much between 105 and 108; (2) The other morning it was 84 F (28.5 C) when I got up at 4:30 a.m.; (3) When I […]
Someone told me these are called “St. Andrews Cross Spiders” because, sometimes, the extra webbing forms a cross shape around the spider at rest. I have no idea if this is true. Still, it’s an easy name to remember. I see these spiders hanging out all over the place, often suspended above Annie Creek, and […]
This afternoon the high temperature hit 107 degrees F (41.7 C), as usual, but everyone was sitting around on Easter Sunday, so it wasn’t too bad. We spent the afternoon playing Cranium (a board game) in the air-conditioned office. And at least this holiday wasn’t as hot as Christmas, which was a roasting 113 degrees […]
I was excited to discover a Fairy-Wren nest with three eggs a couple weeks ago. When Michelle and I went to band the seven-day-old chicks, though, we found only one giant baby in the nest, almost twice the size of an adult Purple-crowned Fairy-Wren. A cuckoo! Cuckoos in Australia are like cowbirds in North America: […]
The first time I saw a five-foot lizard walking around here, I was a bit surprised. Now, I’ve seen so many that they blend in with the wallabies and crocs. The biggest ones are the Yellow-spotted Goanas. They look pretty much like giant lizards with blocky heads, thick legs, and long tails, and walk with […]
JoJo, who has worked at Mornington Station for the last five years, left today for new adventures elsewhere. So, last night, most everyone headed to Sir John Gorge for a farewell party. The idea was to take in the sunset before the full moon rose an hour later. The sunset held its part of the […]
After 22 days without being replenished, we finally received a new shipment of food this week – $1,700 of groceries, to be exact. For me, after nearly running out completely, it was like Christmas all over! The system here is simple. Every couple of weeks, everyone at Mornington fills out an Excel spreadsheet with what […]
This morning, while tracking Fairy-Wrens, I noticed a lot of activity around a small, shallow puddle in the gravel along Annie Creek. So, I took out my camera, sat still for five minutes, and photographed the action. Within seconds, birds were all around me. In such dry conditions, water is a precious commodity around here, […]
Yesterday evening, a tight truckload of us headed to Lake Gladstone (about an hour and a half from here), bird guides and gin and tonics in hand, to see what was up. Maybe, being a lake, it might have some waterbirds. A spartan bird blind was built there last November, at the end of the […]
Michelle abruptly diverted onto a claypan as six of us absorbed shocks in the truck this afternoon. “I think this is the track,” she said, peering at a faint tire smudge in hard-baked mud, and cranked the wheel. Soon, we were literally driving through a forest, with 20-foot high trees whipping under the front grille. […]
If you’re from the U.S., you might not have heard of Xavier Rudd – one of Australia’s most famous musicians. I’ve been a fan of his music since last September, when I went to one of his concerts near San Francisco. In fact, two of his tracks are in a playlist that I just listened […]
While hacking through the hot, riparian jungle, we encounter a lot of bugs (and, once a month, even sample them scientifically – but that’s another story). Among the most interesting are the green ants. More specifically, Green Tree Ants (Oecophylla smaragdina). As the name implies, they’re green, and they nest in trees, building softball-sized enclosures […]
I spent the day commuting between far-flung Fairy-Wren territories, and, by afternoon, had hiked 4 kilometers off-trail and biked an hour and a half on 4×4 roads, getting progressively dustier, sweatier, and generally grimier as the sun climbed scorching overhead. In the afternoon, with the temperature over a hundred degrees, I hit a patch of […]
The Fairy-Wren crew got up at 4am this morning and, in predawn darkness, drove to a relatively distant territory along the Adcock River, where we hoped to catch one particular female Fairy-Wren which had been seen without a band last week (meaning it had just immigrated to this area). We drove to the end of […]
When I casually mentioned to Paul this afternoon that I hadn’t seen a snake here yet, he smirked. “I’ve seen five in the last two weeks,” he said, “and had close encounters with four of them.” When I asked just how close, he smiled, and said, “Come with me.” We headed to a hole in […]
Another hot one at Mornington; I’m coming up with lots of definitions of heat. In the afternoon, it’s too hot to step barefoot on rocks (they singe). Metal objects can’t be left in the sun or they burn to the touch. Black ants disappear when the temperature is just under a hundred degrees, and, above […]
Jen and I set off at 6am this morning toward some old Aboriginal wall paintings accessible by a 10-kilometer off-trail hike. The directions were simple: where the road ends, start walking. Continue past two sets of rapids until you see a gorge open up on the right. Swim across the river, bushwhack up the fork, […]
This week’s high temperature forecast (in C) for Fitzroy Crossing (the closest place with an official forecast) goes like this: Sunday, 42; Monday, 42; Tuesday, 42; Wednesday, 42; Thursday, 42; Friday, 42; Saturday, 41 – with a chance of thunderstorms. That’s 108 F every day this week, down to 106 on Saturday – thunderstorms apparently […]
There’s a big white board outside the research lab at Mornington Station for general updates, scheduling, and communication. Today it said “drinks and snacks for sunset on the hill – 5pm.” So, after another long day in the field with Fairy-Wrens, people gathered in late afternoon to make the short drive to a nearby escarpment, […]
My first question was: Do they celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day in Australia? In fact, they do; Australians are just as happy as Americans to obsess about green things. My second question was: What do we do? We quickly determined that green food coloring does not exist at Mornington Station, so green drinks were out. But […]
When sweat began dripping uncontrollably off my nose at 5:45 a.m. this morning, I knew it was going to be a hot one. I was just beginning a long march down the Adcock River to census a distant group of Fairy-Wren territories; basically, this involved a six-kilometer bike ride followed by a eight-km bushwhack downriver […]
Michelle and I just finished banding three baby Purple-crowned Fairy-Wrens in their nest. They are seven days old and being fed by mom, dad, and a “helper” (Fairy-Wrens are cooperative breeders, remember?) so those babies are getting a lot of attention today! Each youngster got its own combination of color bands; the tiny bands will […]