A Mystery Revealed

Linda G guessed a platypus which is a non marsupial native Aussie (a monotreme to be exact).

Susan got nearer than she thought with “Doesn't look like feathers”

Zoologist Kristen had two goes, she got very close but picked the wrong guy. Yes some feathers do look like fur! (And Oz has about 60 native rodent species so that was a good guess too)

Sorry Carolyn V not a Kanga.

Myrna it is feathers but not a cockatoo!

So closer this time but the mystery critter is
A fairy penguin !

Also known as little penguins (Eudyptula minor) and blue penguins these guys are found in the waters around Southern Oz and Kiwiland (uh New Zealand).They are the smallest of all penguins and are ultra-cute.

They breed in burrows in colonies scattered around the coast of Oz and NZLike my last tough one I posted a piccie with this guy some time ago.

I shot these guys at Melbourne Zoo. The Zoo population were either bred in captivity or rescued in waters around Melbourne because they were sick or injured.

There are a number of colonies in Port Phillip bay the closest being at suburban St Kilda.

Ho Hum, More Piccies and Another Dead Volcano?

Well here I go again, inflicting more of my holiday piccies on you. Uncle Harry would be proud of me.
Well actually he probably wouldn’t. Nothing anyone does comes up to his standards.

Oh boy, now I am developing a persecution complex about a figment of my own imagination.

Anyway here we go...

After I explored the Tarragal Caves we headed back to our accommodation at Warrnambool.

On the way I ran the risk of driving Deb nuts by pausing to take some shots of this ruined farmhouse.Unfortunately, there are ruins like this scattered over large swathes of Oz countryside. Some of them are the natural consequence of farmers going bust. Many though are the result of a darker piece of Oz history called soldier settlement.

Enough about that for now.

I also paused to grab a piccie or two of this shed that was catching the setting sun.
I was up bright and early (before dawn) the next morning. I raced out to catch the dawn piccies I posted a week or two ago.

After I got the dawn shots I went a little further east to the Bay of Islands
which I knew would still be in shadow.
As it continued to get light I took a series of shots of the bay in the early light. Then as the sun got a little higher it began painting the cliffs of the sea stacks with the amazing gold of morning.

For those of you interested a post made last year shows the cliffs later in the day. (Uncle Harry was plaguing me back then too).

With the colours fading into a regular day and getting hungry I headed back to a leisurely breakfast with Deb (who isn’t silly enough to be up in the pre-dawn dark).

We decided to go for another drive. Our first port of call (literally although we were driving) was the Warrnambool foreshore. I took this shot of Middle Island (which happens to be a Fairy Penguin Colony). In an interesting application of lateral thinking Parks Victoria has a number of Marremmas who live on the island to protect the penguins from vermin like introduced foxes.

I also captured this image of the clouds dancing in a sunlit morning sky. As a total aside can you see the error in this piccie that would have many "real" photographers "tut tuting"?

Then we motored a short distance to Tower Hill.
Like Mt Leura Tower hill is a huge maar volcano. In this piccie the range of hills centre frame are secondary cones that formed in the crater. This second pic gives a better idea of the crater wall and the secondary cones in the middle. The level area is the floor of the caldera. In normal years the crater is a lake with islands in the middle but after 13 years of drought most of the lake is gone.
This piccie taken inside the caldera shows an eroding segment of the crater wall, you can see how the original volcano built up in layers, each one representing a series of eruptions.

Inside the crater I caught this fellow and his two half grown chicks.He is an Emu, an Oz native and the second largest bird in the world (after the African Ostrich). Incidentally I know he is a “he” because with Emus the dad takes full responsibility for incubation and raising the brood of several females. He would have had somewhere between 10 and 30 chicks hatch out. Unfortunately he probably lost most to foxes. Foxes aren’t native they were introduced in the Nineteenth Century for “Gentlemen” to hunt. They have decimated native wildlife (with the help of domestic cats that have gone feral). Fortunately, the chicks are probably large enough to avoid predation now, their biggest danger as they continue growing will be the risk of getting hit by cars.

My final two piccies of the day are from a bay near Port Fairy where we stopped for afternoon tea.

The Cuteness Factor

Well I promised a post on “The Cuteness Factor” so here you go.
As I said in my last post (before getting distracted) Mon, my sister-in-law and her family came down from Queensland to visit us last weekend.

Well on Sunday we took them out to one of our favourite haunts, the upper Yarra Valley. The river was beautiful in the summer sun.On Monday we took the little girls (and their parents) to the zoo.
I always have mixed feelings about zoos: I find the plight of wild animals caged quite disheartening; but the children love to see the animals and, I must admit, so do I.
Also, I tell myself that modern zoos play a significant part in conservation of endangered species. This has certainly been the case with some small Australian species brought back from the brink with captive breeding programs, followed by wild release into national parks.

Melbourne Zoo has been undergoing renovation and upgrading for some time. One of the newer features has been the placing of various sculptures, that can only be described as kitsch, around the zoo.

One side benefit of these items is that small children seem to be quite as fascinated by these object d’art as by the real animals.

Meet the nieces: Mon’s “big girl” Kiele uses an elephant sculpture’s trunk as a window.See, I told you, cuteness factor in buckets.

This is Kennedy, Mon’s precocious not quite one year old.
As you can see, she is riding a “crocodile”.

Because the girls are so young we didn’t see the whole zoo.
But these were some of their favourites.

The giraffes.The butterfly house.
Here Kennedy stares intently through the rails at one of the butterflies.
Australian fur seals.In recent decades these seals have been absolutely protected under Australian law.
The seals in the zoo here were all rescued either injured or as orphaned youngsters. According to the keeper this female was found as a pup on a dairy farm in the southwest of the state. She was miles from the sea and starving. Raised in captivity she was released but she wouldn’t leave the area she was released in and kept approaching people begging to be “rescued” again. In the end when it was obvious she was not going to make it on her own she was returned to the zoo.

And last but not least Fairy Penguins. Also known as Little or Blue penguins these guys are very common around Australia’s southern coasts.
As I posted once before during daylight hours they fish out at sea, then at night they come ashore to burrows where they raise their chicks. I have seen these guys in the wild, but only resting in their burrows.
There is quite a tourist industry built around them at a place called Phillip Island people watch them come ashore after dark.

Then when the girls had enough it was time to head for home.

Kennedy peers back from her dad’s arms, by the time I took this photo she was so tired she could barely keep her eyes open.Tired but cute!