September 1 - spring break trip

It turns out it was rather cold last night, so I ended up digging out an extra blanket from under the bed to keep myself warm. I've gotten used to having heat in my dorm, and the coldspell here in Perth caught my unheated room by surprise. When I woke up this morning, it was also raining again. eww.

Diane decided to take me to some of the parks outside of the Perth City area today, and had come up with an agenda that would cover the whole day. The first stop of the day was a small park called Noble Falls. There is a creek there, and it turns out the water ends up falling a few feet, so viola, they named it Noble Falls. Not a very impressive waterfall by any means. The rain ended just moments before we got there, and we decided to do the 3k walk through the bush and see what was around. The sun came out pretty quickly, and it ended up being a very pleasant walk. At the beginning of the walk there was a fair number of birds that decided to start singing and being active when the sun came out. I saw several new species, including a small group of Australian ringneck parrots, a striated pardolate, and a rufous whistler, and a laughing kookaburra. The rufous whistler had a really pretty song. I learned from Diane that the ringneck parrots are called "28s" by most people in Australia, because their call sounds a lot like "twenty-eight". A lot of the bushes were blossoming and spring definitely seemed to be springing in Western Australia. Overall the landscape was much greener than what I'm used to back in Canberra, and the weather, though a "cold" compared to normal, was still in the upper 60s.

After completing the trail at Noble Falls, we got lunch out of the car and ate it on a picnic table at the park. Apparently Diane has done a lot of traveling, including a trip around Australia, so she had packed a very nice travel picnic. We had sandwhiches, hot coffee and tea, some raw vegetables, and then fruitcake for desert. Yum! After lunch we headed off to our next destination, another park with a lake. I can't remember even how to pronounce the name of the lake, let alone spell it, so I will call it Lake L. The L-word is some sort of blue flowering shrub that occurs in western Australia after which they named the lake. The walk around Lake L. was another 3k. It was gray and dreary, and for a bit, it drizzled. There were a few birds and wildflowers around, but it wasn't very exciting. I saw some cows in a nice, green pasture at the edge of the park. The pasture was on a hill, and for some reason reminded me very much of pastures back home.

After Lake L. we drove to the Mundaring Weir, a dam/resevoir that supplies water to the region of civilization to the east of the Perth area, where it is very desertlike apparently. I learned that this was one of the first big resevoir/pipeline projects ever done, and one of the original engineers received so much criticism and mockery for the project that he eventually broke down and shot himself 10 months before it was completed. Once completed, the reservoir and pipeline ended up working quite well however, despite the criticism of the project. There was a set of large pipes that we saw going from the dam and up over the hills and through the woods to wherever it is that water goes. The actual dam and lake that it created were beautifully set into the landscape, and we went for a walk on one of the several trails that were present. In someone's yard we ended up seeing a bunch of western gray kangaroos grazing on the lawn, and in someone else's yard we saw a bunch of western gray kangaroos and ringneck parrots munching on some bread that the resident had put in the yard. I saw a cool-looking new dove species on the walk, the common bronze-wing. In the sunlight the wing of the bronze-wing shimmers metallic greens and golds, hence the name. A pretty neat-looking dove!

Finally after we had finished exploring the Mundaring Weir area we went to a wildlife sanctuary called Karakamia (not sure if that's how it's spelled or pronounced... sorry!). We were there for a nighttime wildlife walk. There were several other people there, including a family with some very non-obedient small children. Chris, Diane's partner, met us there, as he came straight from work. As we were pulling up the drive there were a number of white-tailed black cockatoos, and red-tailed black cockatoos flying around and sitting in the trees. These are quite large parrots, and they both sound prehistoric and look prehistoric when they fly. They fly with such slow, deliberate wingbeats that it sometimes looks like they were computer-generated for a movie! They are really fascinating to watch, and overall they're at least as big as or bigger than soem fo the larger hawks species back home, and even bigger than ravens! My bird book says that the red-tailed black cockatoo can be as long as 60cm -- for those who don't have the conversion to feet memorized, that's 2 feet long!

The walk ended up being about 1.5 hours and the guide was very informative. Two of the young children, especially, were very disobedient, and after repeatedly being told by the guide and their parents to stay behind the guide (she had a big, powerful spotlight and didn't want to shine it in peoples' eyes), the guide finally just accepted that they were going to do whatever they wanted, and tried to be as accomodating and fair to them as possible. It turns out that the family with the children were instrumental in the founding of the wildlife sanctuary, so this is probably why the guide decided to be as accomodating to them as she was, despite the fact that they were often getting in the way, often on purpose. No way are my kids ever going to be such wild animals! :-P haha. On the walk we saw a nice variety of noctournal animals, including Brush-tailed and wire-tailed possoms, woylies (the smallest of the kangaroo family... smaller than a cat, and not very shy at all!), Bandicoots, Tamar and brush-tailed wallabys, and even a western grey kangaroo. It was really neat to see all these species wandering around at night!