Mail

We've been delivering junk mail for a few months now and we've seen a huge variety in letterboxes, some are great, some are really original, and some are absolutely useless for anything bigger than a postcard. I've even had a few that have fallen over or broken as soon as I touched them, must be a hard life being a letterbox.

There's a question I've been mulling over since we started doing the deliveries and I still haven't come up with an answer.

Why do letterbox manufacturers find it necessary to put the word 'letters' or 'mail' on the front of their product?

It's not like the postie is going to get confused and not know where to put the mail. Quite often the word is so big there's nowhere to put the house number, or a 'No Junk Mail' sticker. I'll admit I have seen a couple of letterboxes that could have done with a label on them, one was a metal pedal bin. I don't think I ever put anything in that one. If it had the number on it I might have, but then so does the wheelie bin.

Time to move

They've found me again.

I got a letter today from the Reader's Digest Sweepstakes people to say I've got a good chance to win $500,000. I thought I'd got them off my scent years ago, I guess not.

If I ever go missing, don't call the cops, just call Reader's Digest. They'll find anyone eventually. I bet they know where Lord Lucan is.

A stranger in these parts

Regular readers may remember an old post of mine about a strange visitor we had about 18 months ago. If not, you can click here to read about the red-fronted parakeet.

Well we had another visitor today that doesn't look like it's from these parts.



As you know, Donna and I look after native wildlife. We have several Rainbow Lorikeets at the moment, including one I'm hand feeding because it's so young, and we get a lot of them visiting our backyard as well. The visitors were making a bit of noise this morning and when I looked outside I saw the bird in the above picture sitting on our verandah.

If you look at it quickly it looks very much like a Rainbow Lorikeet, just with less colour and more size. The lorikeets were chasing it away from the feeder hanging in our tree, but it was determined to hang around and have a feed, so I had heaps of time to take photos of it.

We have several bird books, so I got them all out and tried to indentify it. The only bird I could find that resembles this one is the Superb Parrot. The thing is though, they have a very restricted range in New South Wales and aren't found anywhere else.

If it is a Superb Parrot, then it's a pretty sure bet that it's an escaped pet, which wouldn't surprise me. We got a call to pick up a couple of birds from a local vet about two months ago. One was a lorikeet and the other a cockatiel. When I opened the cage to get the cockatiel out, he ran up my arm and sat on my shoulder. Apparently, he was delivered to the vet that way after being found in someone's backyard.

We generally don't like the idea of birds being kept in cages as pets, but this little guy is too tame to be released, so he's now got a permanent home with us and he's been named Bruce.

Duck!!!

We've got an Australian Wood Duck into care recently. A friend of ours dropped him off, she said he'd got a problem with one of his legs. We have a local vet that is really good with wildlife, and birds in particular.

So I gave them a call.

"Hello, this is Steve, I've got a woodie..."

"Click."

OK, I approached that the wrong way, I'll try again.

"Hello, this is Steve again. D'you wanna duck..."

"Click".

I was going to try again, but five minutes later there was a knock at the door.

"Don't Taze me Bro!"

The boys in blue were really apologetic when I explained everything to them. They said something about the orange sauce really bringing out the flavours. Personally, I think duck is too boney to compete with chicken or turkey and the idea of blowing up a ducks bum to make Peking duck doesn't really appeal.

----

But seriously though, we did get a duck this evening and he's going to the vet tomorrow to have his leg looked at. Most of my writing lately has been academic stuff, so I thought I'd get bit creative. After all, I'm not being marked on my blog entries.

A few days in the life of a student, day 4

For those of you eagerly waiting to hear about the final day of my stay at Mt Hyland, sorry about the delay. I've had a couple of big uni assignments to finish and they got priority, as did work and the animals. Now lets see if I can remember what happened on the last day.

As I was eager to head home as early as possible when we finished, I starting packing my gear into the car as soon as I got up, something those in tents should have done. We didn't actually know what time we would finish, but if it was early I could probably be home before it got dark. If we finished late I'd be looking for somewhere to stay in Dorrigo or Grafton, or even back in Armidale, and driving home the next day.

After breakfast we went down to collect the nests that we'd put out on day one and, surprise surprise, the one I'd put out had a mark on the egg where something had tried to eat it.



Back up to the main buildings and we all sat around examining our nests and working out what nests had been attacked and by what. The one in the picture above had most likely been predated by some kind of mammal like a mouse, some of our other nests had been predated by birds.

We then gathered in the dining room where a spokesperson from each group got up and told us all what they'd found when searching for their endangered species. It was unanimous, no group found what they were looking for. Just goes to prove how endangered they are doesn't it.

While we were still in the dining room, the data gathered from the nest predation experiment was collated as we'd be using it for an assignment, one of those I've just recently finished. We were given a bit of an idea how the final exam would be structured, that's normal for the end of a residential school. This one will be sent to us and we'll have two weeks to complete it and send it back in.

Once all that was done we had morning tea before being turned loose to pack up before lunch. This was around 11am and I was already packed, so a cup of tea and a bit of cake and I was ready to go. I said my goodbyes to a few friends and if it hadn't been for the fact that the heavens opened as I was eating my cake, you wouldn't have seen me for dust. Actually, rain had been forecast for the whole time we were there, so we were very lucky it came when it did. I'm just glad I wasn't one of those people that hadn't packed their tent yet.

I was home by five, just as Donna was finishing feeding all the animals. There was a huge rain shower when I was about two minutes from home too, I wonder if someone was trying to tell me something. It was sad to be leaving Mt Hyland, because everyone had such a great time, but it was still good to be home.

A few days in the life of a student, day 3

A spoiler alert before I go any further.

If you're studying EM353, conservation biology after 2009 and you've come across this blog while googling Mt Hyland to see what the place is like, well done on your research. However, some of the stuff that we did on day three was something of a surprise and I'm sure Karl and Caroline would prefer to keep it that way. So don't tell anyone what you read here, you'll spoil it for everyone.

Now, on with the story.

We'd expected a bit of rain on day three, actually we'd been expecting it for the whole field trip and had hardly seen any. This is the weather we awoke to. It was so nice that one of my room-mate and I grabbed our cameras and went for a wander.



If it had rained we wouldn't have worried, as our group was staying at camp all day while the others were off with the daisies. We were learning how to use the VORTEX program.

The previous night, our lecturers had been writing people's names on envelopes and occassionally chuckling to themselves as they did so. This morning before we started on VORTEX we found out why. Certain members of the class had been picked to be international delegates for a debate on fishing in the Galapagos Islands. Each of the delegates had to pick a couple of other people to be delegates with them. We were given an information sheet on our country, a more general sheet on the political agendas of all the countries, but most importantly a hidden agenda that we were not to show to any other country.

I was asked by the Bolivian delegate to join her and our agenda was basically that we would listen to whatever the other countries had to say and vote accordingly that night. We were expecting to be lobbied a lot during the day.

Back the the VORTEX activity, each group was given a stack of research papers about the Norther Bettong. A lot of the papers were actually written by our lecturer, Karl. If you click on that link you'll see why we were doing the Northern Bettong, that's what Karl did his PhD on. We had to find answers to several questions, like population density, age of sexual maturity, reproduction rates, etc.

While we were being briefed on all this in the dining room someone at my table noticed that the Australian delegate had left her hidden agenda lying around. Did we do the honourable thing and ignore it? Hell no, I opened it and had a look inside, then put it back down with a chuckle. It was all about the fact that this was the first time they'd been invited to one of these affairs and they just wanted to make friends and get taken out to dinner. After the briefing we sat outside in the sun and went through the research papers.

Once we'd got our Bettong answers we went back inside to the dining room where a projector was connected to a laptop running the VORTEX software. All the data were entered and when the analysis was run it told us how long a population would survive according to what factors were involved. For example, if there were a high number of foxes in the area, the population would become locally extinct within about 20 years due to predation.

On the same theme, we played a game afer lunch. Five groups were formed, each containing five people. These were rock wallaby populations. Each member of each group tossed a coin to find if they were male or female, which turned out to be a problem when one group al ended up the same sex. The rest of us were the unborn, waiting to join a group.

Coins were tossed again to see if the females had joeys or the males dispersed to other populations, or worse they died and joined the unborn group. Within about three generations nearly all the populations had become extinct and I hadn't even had a chance to be born. It was a great example of how small scattered populations have an uphill battle to survive and why conservation is so important.

A lot of the rest of the day was spent lobbying or being lobbied, we were offered massages and furniture by the Swedish delegation to vote their way. Aid was offered by the Americans and the Brits. The North Korean delegate offered us satellites and prostitutes. All in all it was a lot of fun trying to figure out what the hidden agendas were. Australia's agenda had already been found lying around again at least twice. In fact someone actually brought it over to us and read it out aloud.

Before dinner the main delegate from each country had to get up and make a quick speech putting their point of view across. A lot of people got right into this, using some pretty bad foreign accents. The Mexican delegation even wore face masks. Not surprisingly, the Australian's speech sounded remarkably like their hidden agenda, which by now most of us knew.

More lobbying went on before the votes were cast, but by this time it was dark outside, a fire had been lit outside, alcohol had been provided and most of us just stood around in groups having little party atmosphere type chats that had nothing to do with fishing in the Galapagos.

Then the voting started, but one of our hosts was missing. Conderiza Lice, played by Caroline one of our lecturers was nowhere to be found. I'd been standing by the door to start with, but one of the technicians had suggested I find somewhere to sit, as something was going to happen where I was standing. I had my suspicions that that something involved our missing lecturer.

The aforementioned tech was dispatched to find Caroline, but was back in the room within ten seconds saying there'd been a security breach. Then in marched Caroline, dressed as an Ecuadorian woman in a big floppy hat, shawl and blacked out front teeth. We thought that was funny, but when she threw open her shawl to reveal a bandoleer full of babies and started accusing Karl of being the father of one of them, the laughter just kept getting louder.

And that was pretty much it for the university education side of things for that night. I learnt a few things during a long chat with the ladies in my room after dinner, but you don't want to hear about that.

In my next post we all go home, but not before another couple of lessons.

A few days in the life of a student, day 2

Those that didn't have to go looking for Wompoo Pigeons early on the second day got to sleep in a little. Of course, if you wanted to beat the queue for a shower you had to get up early, but that would also mean the shower would be a cold one. I opted for a hot cup of tea and some Cornflakes instead. Actually, I don't usually eat breakfast when I'm at home, but I'm often tempted when I'm away.

During breakfast the topic of farting in the night came up and my passenger from the day before assured me it hadn't been her. So that narrowed it down to one person. Don't worry, you secret is safe with me... and the other people in the room... and their loved ones at home if they chose to talk about it.

We had two activities in the morning. Groups one to five were learning about a program called Vortex. Basically what Vortex does is try to predict how long a particular population will survive, given certain events such as a fire in their habitat, or an increase in the number of foxes. The rest of us jumped in the minibuses and headed out of camp to count Dorrigo Daisies along the side of the road.

There are only around 2000 living Dorrigo Daisy plants in existence and they only live in about three populations in a certain area. Ironically, one of the reasons for their survival is logging. The Dorrigo Daisy is what's called a pioneer species, it grows in areas of disturbance. The logging roads near Mt Hyland are regularly graded by the forestry department and it's this grading that provides the conditions they need to grow.

We were dropped of at the side of the road and, with one person keeping a tally, the rest of us looked for daisies.


You may wonder why most people are on one side of the road and only a few on the other. Well the daisies had never been found on the left side of the road before, but on this day we found some. The vast majority however, were found on the other side of the road. In fact we found so many plants that someone jokingly asked if it could be delisted. On more than one occassion I had to point out to people that they were about to stand on one of the plants.

Because the other group would be counting daisies the next day, we stopped when we got to a certain point. A couple of volunteers carried on up the road to get the buses to come back for us, then after a near miss with an unladen logging truck we headed back to camp.

The idea of us surveying the daisies what not just to see how many there were, but to start off a translocation project. The other group would be collecting seeds the next day and hopefully new seedlings would be planted in a years time by future students doing the same subject. Before lunch we sat on the lawn discussing in our groups what would have to be done as far as seed collection, planting, etc.

Lunch, if memory serves me correctly was a sausage sizzle, with homemade sausages. Afterwards, we stuffed our bags with warm clothes, raingear and torches as we were heading off in the buses again and wouldn't be back until after dark.

First stop was at the top of Jordan's trail, where we walked about half an hour down to the escarpment. The trouble with downhill walks is that the walk back is always uphill.

Once at the escarpment we split into our groups again, ten metres apart along the cliff edge and started collecting data on Beadle's Grevillea. This is an ongoing project and, again, future students will do the same thing to see how the plants are recovering from fires back in 2003.

While some members of our group counted bushes and the flowers thereon, the rest of us got stuck into the other reason we were there, to count poo, specifically the poo of the rock wallaby. We started at the edge of the escarpment and then every ten metres in we would count in a square two metres by two metres. It was soon obvious that the rock wallaby prefers to be on the rocks rather than in the long grass nearby.


I know how it looks, but the guy sitting down with a stick in his hand wasn't there to make sure the others worked hard. That was his poo counting stick.

I'm sure the walk back up to the bus was quicker than the one down, drops of rain are a good motivator.

From Jordan's Trail we headed off to Liberation trail, via a toilet stop. Liberation trail was the site of logging protests many years ago. It brought about changes to the laws in New South Wales that meant logging companies had to do propper environmental impact studies before they started cutting down trees. Those changes eventually became the threatened species act.

We didn't actually get onto the trail, as by then it was dark. Instead, we formed into three groups, each with a spotlight and headed off up the road looking for beasties in the night. I'm not sure what the other groups saw, but ours saw five Greater Gliders and a Tawny Frogmouth. They're both animals I was glad to see. In the case of the glider, I've never seen one before other than in pictures. In the case of the Tawny, I've seen heaps of them, but most have been in captivity. To see on in the wild in the middle of a forest, not just my backyard, was great. I'd been talking about Tawnies the day before and managed to educate a few people on the fact that they aren't owls.

Curry was on the menu for dinner that night and there was plenty of variety, hot or mild, lamb, beef or beans. I think the beans were mainly meant for the vegetarians, but they were popular with everyone, especially in our room. Of the seven people in our room, only one didn't have beans as she didn't like them. When it was brought to her attention that she was the only one not having beens, it was said more as a warning. As it turned out she didn't need to worry, the only farting came from the other side of the room as usual.

In my next post we work out how to make the Northern Bettong extinct, then we become international delegates for a day. Oh, and if you're reading this because you're doing the same subject the following year, no telling.