Ross River Musings

In late afternoon, a flock of straw-necked ibises and a single Australian white ibis foraged on the golf course. The club’s grass is still sodden from heavy rains two days ago that fell in fits ...

Ruminations on the Tropics

Two huge paperbark trees on my street are in blossom, pumping out waves of ‘boiled-potato’ fragrance and attracting hordes of nectarivorous (nectar-feeding) rainbow lorikeets. The lorikeet...

Looking Back at Six Months in Australia

Ground fog hung like silver mist over the Townsville Golf Course at dawn, the rising sun a smear of gold above it. The air smelled and felt cool and damp, like summer’s end in Nova Scotia. Today...

Home from Western Australia

This morning, the hunt was on. A great bowerbird slowly swallowed a spider with a distended, grey abdomen. A white-bellied cuckoo-shrike devoured one insect and immediately flew into an adjacent tree ...