Avatar Remaindered 18

Having a problem posting Avatar Remaindered 18, which I meant to put up yesterday. It obviously didn’t stick. Today the same trouble.

Let me put up a picture. The chapter is called Into the Chasms … Working on it.

Well, it worked. Whatever I did. Really not sure and–you know how it is–I’d rather not touch it in case it disappears again.

18. The Chasms, posted Download

The Channel-billed Cuckoo

I was amazed to see one of these yesterday along Bulimba Creek, getting into the ripe native figs everywhere. Only seen them once before, in my previous stamping grounds.

Picture naturally not sharp, bird was too far away and the photo completely unplanned.

After I took ten photos, scoring an image just twice, the noisy miners took note of me and chased the big bad bird away.

Noisy miners are so aggressive—a channel billed cuckoo doesn’t impinge on them at all —it eats figs too large for them to tackle and lays its eggs in magpie, crow and currawong nests. But still the miners need to chase it away, it’s like they own this stretch of the creek.

A slightly better shot, the bird’s bright red eye put me wise to its identity.

These birds have the loudest most amazing trumpeting calls though this one just said kwark kwark kwark.

They migrate to North and Eastern Australia from New Guinea and Indonesia in spring and stay till autumn/fall.

Urban trees seem to be so confused that a lot of figs are bearing good crops of fruit.

Plover aka ‘Masked Lapwing’

By Charles J. Sharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=145114385

These last few day, whenever I walk into the bedroom for something, I stop and stare out through the windows at a little place on the grass beyond the podium at the plovers nesting there. Pronounced as ‘pluvvers’ according to a long-time Brisbanite.

My camera really does not do it justice so here’s where your imagination must come into play. [If you want to have a go at zooming in? The bird is sitting a little below the third panel of fencing from the right. All you will see is a little brown blob.]

In the last few days, I’ve only seen a couple of intrepid people take the concrete path from the podium across the grass to the old village. One of the dog-walkers had an angry, swooping bird follow them from one end of the path to the other. And, these birds are said to have a poisonous spur on their “wrists” … they have the spurs but they’re not poisonous.

“Breeding usually happens after the winter solstice (June 21), but sometimes before.” Quote from the Wikipedia article. Spot on. The birds began sitting seriously about four days ago. It’ll be interesting to see how long they take to hatch the eggs, as there is no info on that in my bird book or in the Wikipedia article. Today I was lucky enough to see the change over of parents a few minutes after dusk.

The chicks will be dependent on the parents for protection for about 5 months. I can’t see there being enough food (insects and worms) in that grassy area for that long, but if it does happen to suffice, I hope we residents can stay patient enough to see the chicks to maturity.

Talk about counting your chickens before they hatch! The Wildlife of Greater Brisbane tells me suburban birds rarely manage to hatch their eggs. Dogs, cats, foxes, humans … all of them disrupting and chasing and some of them predating. That’s being glum, of course. I did read that the Brisbane Snake Catchers as well as catching and relocating snakes, relocate plover nests. That has got to be a huge operation. Two large angry birds defending four eggs on a flattened bit of grass?

https://snakecatcherbrisbane.net.au/plover-management/

Just checked them and nope, they don’t. But they do give contact details to licensed plover catchers and a link to a neat “404 page IE a page not found”. [This latter will go into my collection of 404’s.]

Out for a Walk

On this good weathered Friday of sunny patches among increasing cloud, I open my door and see this:

…a friendly little display.

Walking to the beginning of the corridor past another unit and then the Refuse Room, turn right and then I see this …

… the elevators to the right, the fire escape at the end. (I’ve missed my favorite painting and the Easter Welcome basket on the left for a reason)

Down one floor and turning right to see a similar corridor to the one above (haha, in both senses) but at the end a door out onto the so-called podium.

I’m an old hand at podiums now, the first one I had anything to do with was in 2020 at the place where I went for respite after my hospitalisation. The only podiums I had anything to do with up to then, were back in the Netherlands in the 1950s, when the ordinary Australian English ‘stage’ was the ‘podium’.

Nowadays, the term seems to used for the first couple of floors of a large tall building. The podium surrounding Vista, the building I live in, is brand new. No moss grows in the between the stones.

Anyway, returning to my walk, once I’m outside the exit door, I see this …

… a painting I’ll be talking about in my Visual Art Project. Shifting my gaze to the right, I see this …

Walk out, turn left and we see the stairs. I’ve been up them twice. Down them once. When I have my walker with me it’s elevators all the way.

Round the corner to the left … in the sun as you can see … is a seat. I do my old lady thing and sit down for a breather … take my final pic for this little jaunt … the view.