Birds in backyards

We live near bushland and get a lot of birds visiting our yard, especially when everything is in flower. For some reason, our Poinciana tree is flowering now after a rather lacklustre performance in December and it recently attracted the attention of a male and female pair of King Parrots. We don’t see King Parrots very often and they never stick around for long, but these two love birds preened and napped for about an hour while Hubby washed the car and I invaded their privacy with my zoom lens.

It is easy to tell the difference between an adult male and female, the male has a red head and his colouring is more vibrant. The female has more green, and she kept a watchful eye on me whilst going about her business. It was a real pleasure to see these birds hanging out in our garden, so often that tree is full of less colourful but more vocal crows and noisy miner birds.

Sleepy male King Parrot

The vibrant male King Parrot

Male King Parrot in Poinciana tree

Always watching me, female King Parrot

Preen time

The female King Parrot

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Wishing you a Merry Christmas

Love and best wishes for the festive season

Sam and Bundy

xxx

PS: He is smiling on the inside

Clouds and light

November is storm season in Queensland and we’ve had a couple of loud and scary ones but thankfully the worst of them missed our place (touch wood). As a twenty something loving in Newcastle I discovered how much I loved a good storm when staying with family near the beach. From their house I watched in awe as the clouds rolled in and the light changed creating an eery atmosphere before the skies opened and the lightning let loose. It was magic.

There were pockets of storm action Sunday afternoon, mainly to the north of us so we got very little rain and only a few rumbles of thunder. We did however see some amazing cloud formations and fantastic light as we strolled around a local sports field. Bundy could not have cared less about any of it, he was too busy following random scent trails. With only my iPhone at hand I tried to capture the amazing nature of the clouds and light using the Lightoom mobile app and my phone’s native camera app. The images are a little dark, more post-processing required or perhaps there are better apps for capturing these types of scenes on a smartphone.

The year that was.

January

A relatively quiet month punctuated by time spent cuddling gorgeous shelter dogs waiting for their forever homes. Bundy celebrated his 9^th birthday and unbeknown to us Australia Day was the last time we took Maxi to the beach, she loved splashing around in the surf and afterwards would sleep for hours.

Bundy ready for Australia Day

Maxi girl at the beach on Australia Day

February

A python and lots of cute puppies plus a lunch date with friends by the water. A short, sweet in stinking hot month.

Puppies at the AWLQ Shelter

Python at the shelter

Lunch date with friends

March

Maxi’s 15^th birthday is celebrated, Easter fun and games with the fur kids and a new car.

Maxi girl celebrates 15 years

Me and the new car

Easter food

Easter Maxi

Easter Bundy

Burleigh Heads at Easter

April

Sadly, we said goodbye to my father in-law who had been unwell for a couple of years. Even though he had been married to my mother in-law for a few years he was entrenched in our family and is greatly missed.

May

A much anticipated trip to Scotland. Traveling with a group of artists on a paint-along with my art teacher for two weeks was an amazing experience and provided me with lots of inspiration for my art and further travel in the UK.

Rainy day in Edinburgh

The Great Hall, National Portrait Gallery Scotland

Art teacher doing a demonstration

Seaside village of Crail

Crovie at sunset

Macaroni Cheese for lunch

Unison pastels being prepared for sale

Art studio, Gardenstown

Fellow artists in Scotland

June

Always lots of dogs waiting at the Animal Welfare League, I love my Sundays with them and it is hard not to fall in love with all of them.

Mitzy

Buster

Squishy

Pig for adoption

July

Commissioned to do a portrait of Rumpole the chocolate lab in pastel, stalked by a pigeon on our morning walk and an art class focused on drawing birds. Finally winter seems to have arrived bringing with it some spectacular sunrises and the fur kids are loving their new blankets.

Rumpole, my first commission

Stalked by a pidgeon

Keeping warm in their new blankets

Glorious winter sunrise

Pastel art class – drawing birds

August

The weather starts getting warmer and Hubby celebrates his birthday with traditional fire making and drinks with family and friends. Walks with Maxi are getting shorter and she happily shares the rug with Bundy.

Two black dogs

Bundy making the most of the warmer days at the end of Winter

Birthday cake

Hubby ‘making fire’

September

Losing Maxi broke my heart, such a vibrant and happy girl. Gone but never forgotten.

Happy days

Fun at the beach

Missing you

The last photo of our beautiful girl

Our Maxi girl

October

After losing our dear old girl, time with friends was especially important.

Grand final night in the park with friends

Annual catch up with a dear friend

Bushwalking with a friend

November

The festive season started early at work, our team heading to a winery for a long lunch to celebrate a good year with good people. There are always dogs waiting to be adopted and every Sunday I take photos of them to raise awareness on social media in the hope that it will assist in finding them a family faster. I also finished another commission, Honey the cat, sibling to Rumpole.

Charlie

Lunch with my amazing team

Honey the cat illustration

December

A quick trip to Newcastle to visit my brother and his family as well as meeting my new niece. So nice that the two families live in the same city, makes it easy to fit in quality time with all of them. Christmas was perfect, good company and good food. Now I am in need of a break, some quiet time at home after a busy and emotional year.

Flight to Newcastle

My gorgeous new niece

Christmas in the park with friends

Bundy the elf

Christmas decorations

Christmas Eve with a very good friend. We have been friends since we were 7 .

Christmas Eve in Surfers

Bundy at the beach Christmas morning

A walk in Springbrook National Park

Springbrook National Park, Queensland

Springbrook National Park  is located in the Gold Coast hinterland, 45 minutes from the coast and not far from the border dividing Queensland from New South Wales. It is part of the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia World Heritage Area and declared by UNESCO. The earliest humans to live in this area were the Yugambeh people, now acknowledged as the traditional owners. Throughout the park you will see signs written in English and in Yugambeh language.

Saturday was the perfect day for a walk in the Springbrook National Park, my friend and I choosing the Class 3 Purling Brook Falls circuit  which is 4 kilometres long and takes the average person 2-3 hours to complete. Add another 45 minutes if you want to visit Warringa Pools. If you’re keen on taking photographs, want to stop for a bite to eat or have a swim then add a bit longer. There are shorter and longer walking circuits plus a couple of lookouts if you just want to admire the view.

View from a lookout near the information centre

The pools at the top of Purling Brook Falls

Looking down from a lookout near Purling Brook Falls

Rock pools at the top of the escarpment

Subtropical rainforest

Looking up at where we had been

Purling Brook Falls

Purling Brook Falls and suspension bridge

Temperatures can be cooler in the park, we wore long pants and a long sleeve shirt and felt comfortable for most of the walk although we did see plenty of people wearing gym gear but they were moving at a much faster pace than us. Wearing long sleeves and long trousers helps avoid ticks and leeches. I also recommend taking a bottle of water and a snack or two plus sunblock and insect repellant, you can still get sunburned walking through the forest and the mosquitoes can be vicious. There are a few locations that are fenced off from visitors, including the top of the Purling Brook Falls and the pool at the bottom for safety reasons and possibly to protect the immediate environment.

Springbrook provides the visitor the opportunity of seeing and hearing a variety of wildlife, we frequently heard the call of the Eastern Whipbird and Bush Turkeys are extremely common. When walking along one section of the park we heard the rustling of leaves as something moved slowly through the undergrowth. Patiently we waited and were rewarded with a glimpse of a goanna, eventually he decided that it was safe to come out of hiding so we watched him as he crossed the path and ventured up the hill and undercover. Lorikeets, kookaburras, wrens and robins are also common, but some of them are so small and move so quick that I didn’t stand a chance when it came to taking a photo. Seeing a pademelon flee from the verge and into the bush as we drove back from the ‘best of all’ lookout was a special treat, it is not often that we get to see this type of wallaby.

A glimpse of a goanna in the undergrowth

Goanna or Lace Monitor making a run for it

Heading back into the undergrowth

Having packed enough nut bars to feed a small school group, we grazed throughout the walk and rewarded our efforts at the end with a visit to The Fudge Shop. The coffee smelled too good to resist and we bought a chunk of lemon meringue and creme brûlée fudge for an extreme sugar hit. If fudge is not your thing they do serve ice cream and there is a small selection of local produce including arts and crafts for sale.

I imagine that Springbrook National Park is really popular in the warmer months, and that the creeks and waterholes fill up with day trippers and families camping nearby. At the Natural Bridge section of Springbrook you can see glow-worms after sunset, their environment is particularly sensitive so there are rules around visiting this location. The Natural Bridge is easily accessed and the walk through subtropical rainforest to see the naturally formed arch over the creek is well worth the effort.

Having been on the Gold Coast for 17 years, I cannot believe that I have not spent more time exploring such a spectacular part of Queensland. It definitely won’t be that long before I return to Springbrook, there are more walks to do and it is a wonderful way to get some exercise and experience nature.

Warringa Pools

Wild raspberry plant

Swell Festival 2016 – part 2

On my last post I shared some of the sculptures featured in the Swell 2016 Sculpture Festival. As promised, here is a part two of my selection of images.

Pyramid made of bread cartons

Project Bread

Currumbin Beach

View of Surfers Paradise from Currumbin Rock

Venomous Blue – Blue ringed octopus

Koalas, Kangaroos and Echidnas at Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary

A visit to the Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary in Queensland is highly recommended, for children and the young at heart it is a fabulous way to spend a day. As soon as you walk through the entry gate you will smile at the sight of koalas sitting among tree branches, munching away on eucalyptus leaves or having a nap. These beautiful creatures, like so many of our native flora and fauna are victims of progress, their natural environment destroyed by developers and their lives threatened by domestic animals and traffic. The wildlife sanctuary does a wonderful job of raising awareness of the plight of our native animals, educating children and caring for the sick and injured at their wildlife hospital.

There are plenty of opportunities to get up close and personal with some of the animals. For a fee you can have your photo taken cuddling a koala or you can buy food for the lorikeets and kangaroos and feed them by hand. We didn’t do any of that, however we did venture into the kangaroo enclosure and took great pleasure in patting young kangaroos while they were dozing in the sunlight. The largest and oldest of the male kangaroos was taking a nap near the gate, at 8 years old he has fathered plenty of kangaroos, the second male is 4 years old and not quite as large although one of the volunteers told us that his nickname was Fatty.

My friends and I spent a day there recently and we loved every minute. When our legs grew weary and our stomachs hungry we hopped on the people mover train and enjoyed a ride through the park and selected a lunch venue. The sanctuary’s rainforest environment is filled with the sound of birds calling and at times, howling dingoes, the train passes by the enclosures of kangaroos, wallabies, water birds and the Tasmanian Devil. Cameras and phones in hand we took hundreds of photos of creatures we don’t often get to see as well as a few that we will never see in the wild because their numbers are low and they are on the endangered list. I regretted not taking a camera with better zoom than my iPhone, the digital zoom on an iPhone really isn’t great and many of my photos look more painterly than photographic.

Wallabies

8 yo Male Kangaroo with a volunteer

Young kangaroo enjoying the sun

Echidna

Echidna

Hairy nosed Wombat

Dingoes – where do they come from

Sleeping wombats

Sleepy Koala

Having a stretch

Huge crocodile

About the Tree Kangaroo

Tree Kangaroo

Cassowary – huge birds and quite dangerous with their sharp talons and beak

The other half of our coat of arms, the emu

Where to start?

Time for a swim

Water Monitor, these little fellows were everywhere

People can walk amongst these wonderful creatures in this environment but not recommended in their natural environment.

Burleigh beach walk

Easter in Australia means a 4 day weekend, we have a public holiday on Good Friday and another on Easter Monday. It is usually a time when people pack their family into their car and head off to visit extended family or head to the beach to make the most of the warm weather before Autumn kicks in. We generally stay home, relaxing and avoiding traffic the main aim. Sometimes family pop in for a visit however this year it was just the two of us with our two black doggies, a nice break after a hectic start to the year.

Even though the house was void of visitors we still fit in some quality time with family. Hubby’s sister and her family had booked into an apartment at Burleigh Heads on the southern end of the Gold Coast. It is a great spot and from their apartment it is a short walk to the beach, cafes and a variety of small, non-franchised shops. On Monday morning we set the alarm for early, left Maxi snoozing on her bed and took Bundy to the beach to see the sunrise and join Hubby’s sister K for a walk. It was a perfect morning, the predicted rain never appeared and there was wonderful cloud formations happening which made the sunrise so much more interesting.

There is a path along the esplanade that leads into Burleigh National Park, dogs aren’t allowed in the National Park so we stopped at the top of Burleigh headlands and joined many others in admiring and photographing the sunrise. Some photographers were there to take photos of the surfers out in the water, I have to say that I did feel a little lens envy when I saw the zoom on their cameras. Turning around we headed north, choosing to walk on the sand rather than continue on the footpath. Bundy loves the beach, he’s not too fond of swimming but he loves zig-zagging through the water and the sand, oblivious to everyone passing by. He is such a happy chappy when out and about and if given a chance he’ll say hello to other dogs and engage them in play for a short while, however he does prefer to hang with his two legged friends.

It was a beautiful way to spend the last morning of our long weekend, I hope you all had a wonderful Easter as well.

 

 

Lamington National Park flora and fauna

Lamington National Park is World Heritage Listed and includes over 20,000 hectares of diverse forest ranging from sub-tropical rainforest to dry eucalypt forest. The park is home to a variety of flora and fauna, providing a wealth of photographic opportunities for everyone.

Wallaby and joey

Alpaca farm on the road to Lamington National Park

Female Regent Bowerbird

Regent Bowerbird

Female Regent Bowerbird

Female King Parrot

Yellow throated Scrub Wren

Eastern Whipbird

Crimson Rosella

The bower of a Satin Bowerbird

Eastern Yellow Robin

Lamington National Park

Lamington National Park waterfalls

Sunset at O’Reilly’s Rainforest Retreat

O’Reilly’s Rainforest Retreat is located  in Lamington National Park in the Gold Coast Hinterland. Away from the hustle and bustle of everyday living, you can choose to spend a day or stay for a while and take the time to explore the rainforest surrounds and soak in some of the most spectacular sunsets.

I had the pleasure of staying there a few years ago and whilst there have been changes to the retreat accommodation, the sunsets remain as beautiful as ever.

O’Reillys accommodation nestled on the hill among the rainforest

O’Reilly’s Rainforest Retreat Accommodation

The beautiful grounds of O’Reilly’s

Sunset view from OReilly’s Accommodation

Magical location for a retreat

Moonlight Crag – perfect for watching the sun set

…no words

Sunset at Moonlight Crag

Sunset at Moonlight Crag

What’s not to love about this view