Back from Armidale

People often get confused when I tell them I'm going to Armidale for residential school. They assume I'm going there for exams.

What we actually do is the practical stuff that, as external students, we don't get to do at home, like mixing chemicals in chemistry class and stinking the lab out with rotten egg gas as a result.

As well as chemistry I'm doing vertebrate zoology this semester, that's the study of animals with backbones, like us. The res school involves drawing lots of pictures of different types of animals and their internal anatomy.

Below is a picture of a cane toad, part way through being dissected by yours truly.



This isn't the first time I've dissected a cane toad at uni, but I never cease to be amazed at what's inside them. If you're interested, the pink spongy looking things in the picture are lungs, between them is the heart and the liver (the liver is the dark bit). Underneath the lung that I'm holding up with a probe is the stomach and those spotty looking things are eggs (it's a female toad).

The animals we dissect are well and truly dead by the time we're let loose on them, but it's not unusual to cut open a cane toad and find its heart still beating. The one in the picture wasn't, but a couple of my classmates were surprised when they realised there's was still pumping away. The reason it does this is that the heart is actually its own power supply. To put it another way, it supplies its own electricity to make it pump. It'll often carry on doing this for quite a while after death in some animals until it runs out of energy.

As well as the toads, we dissected trout (some of which ended up as dinner for some people, they were fresh from the hatchery at Ebor) and mice, so we could compare the differences in the way they lived.

It wasn't all cutting up dead animals though. We also did some spotlighting for nocturnal animals and some trapping and on the Tuesday we spent a couple of hours birdwatching around Dumaresq (pronounced dooMAreck) Dam followed by a pizza lunch. In all we counted fifty four different species of bird, including a Tawny Frogmouth sitting on its nest. Oh, and we analysed bat calls on the last day. Four Anabat devices were placed in the area we'd been spotlighting in and we went through the files to figure out what species of bat they were. There were about half a dozen different species in all, flying around while we were there. We didn't see a single one.

Apart from all the drawing, it was another enjoyable res school, but I was glad to get back home again, especially since it was our fourth wedding anniversary the day I got back. It's also warmer up here. It was six degrees Celsius when I left Armidale yesterday morning and twenty four degrees here when I got home.

I'm still here

It's been quite a while since my last blog entry, sorry if you've been dropping round and I wasn't in so to speak.

If you live in Australia you may have heard about a plane crash a couple of weeks ago where an aerobatic Yak-52 crashed into the water off Stradbroke Island. The pilot of that aircraft was Barry Hempel. I learnt to fly at Hempel's Aviation and made a lot of friends there, one of which introduced me to my wife, Donna. Donna and I have even done a couple of trips away with Barry and his family. So you can see how Barry's death was a bit of a shock to us. I was going to write a tribute to him, but everytime I started writing it in my head, it either didn't seem right, or I got emotional. In the end it didn't get written.

Suffice to say, Barry had a huge impact in a lot of people's lives and Donna and I are no different. He'll be missed.

On top of that I've had university assignments to write and animals to feed. Did I say I was bored a few weeks ago?

So here I am, finally getting around to writing again while I sit in a little cabin in Armidale all on my lonesome. Donna couldn't come with me as she's too busy with work and the animals this time.

I'm down here for about twelve days. I've got two residentials, two days of chemistry which I finished yesterday and four days of vertebrate zoology, with a five day break in between.

What do you do when you're far from home in a country town all by yourself? Well normally Donna and I would have probably done a bit of a road trip for a few days, to see some places we haven't yet seen in this area, or even some we have seen. Coffs Harbour is a three hour drive from here and a nice place to visit. Actually, it's probably a nice place to live. where's the fun in exploring without your partner though.

So I'm hanging around Armidale for those five days and just doing little day trips with my camera.









Today was a thirty-five kilometre drive to Wollomombi falls. I've got to do some grocery shopping tomorrow, but I don't know what I'll do the next day. Tamworth is only an hour and a half south of here, so I might visit there again.

In between all this I'm catching up on a bit of reading for zoology and trying not to forget which day is Sunday. so I don't miss Doctor Who.

Macro photography from a distance

Okay, it's not the best quality, but it's not bad considering the way it was taken.

Usually when I do macro-photography I set my dSLR up on a tripod, I use extension tubes between the lens and the camera so I can focus much closer than normal and I use a decent flash to provide the extra light needed.

The picture below was taken with my Olympus C-5050z from our back verandah, about ten metres away from the subject using available light.



This is how I did it. The picture below is a spotting scope. They're usually used for birdwatching (of the feathered variety), they're also used by shooters to see if they managed to hit their target. This one is a relatively cheap one compared to what is on the market, but it certainly works well. Those flowers usually have ants in them collecting the nectar. If there'd been one in that particular flower you would have been able to see it. It zooms in to 60x magnification. The equivalent amount of power in telephoto lens for an SLR camera would cost many, many thousands of dollars.

That's why digiscoping is so popular with birdwatchers. Basically, you put your digital camera (even a point and shoot) on the end of a spotting scope and snap away.

I don't yet have an adaptor to mount the camera on the scope, I just hold the camera up to the eyepiece, but it's still pretty good I think.

I took the scope to the Boondall Wetlands with my nephew Joe yesterday as he's doing a school assignment about the wetlands. I think all the birds must have got prior warning we were on the way as there were hardly any to be seen.



The flower is on that bush up against the shed.



If you're interested in trying digiscoping, here is the scope I have. That's not the price I paid though, we know someone that works for a wholesaler.

A friendly visitor

Fellow blogger Dave asked me recently if I had any pictures of wildlife in civilisation, other than the ones we're looking after. Well we've been getting a very friendly visitor to our backyard the last few days, so I thought I'd post a few photos of him.









We suspect he may have been in care at some stage as he's very tame. Wild kookaburras will eat from your hand once they get used to you, but this one let Sarah pat him yesterday. That's something you won't see very often.

It's an eerie feeling walking to within touching distance of a bird like that, a bird that hunts, and having him stare you right in the eye with that huge beak pointing straight at you.

It's got to the point now where he'll pretty much come when he's called. I only have to tap the railing on the back verandah and over he flies. I'm not sure where he spends the night, but he's in our yard nearly all day, just sitting on the clothes hoist.

The other day he sat on top of the lorikeets' cage and they all climbed up like ninjas and started pulling feathers off his backside.

Bath time

If you've ever tried to have a bath in a handbasin you'll know how hard it is. There's always parts of you that you just can't get into the water properly.

We're looking after four lorikeets at the moment, all of them came to us after suffering concussion and will soon be released. It's a nice sunny day, so they decided it would be a good day for a bath. Unfotunately, the bowl containing their drinking water is a little too small for bathing, but they tried anyway.






I've put a bigger container in the bottom of their cage now, so hopefully they'll realise what it's for and start bathing in that. More likely they'll just poo in it.

My family are a buch of wildlife magnets

I'm sitting on the back verandah as I write this, watching a young male brushtail possum in one of our feeders and it got me thinking. As you probably know, we're right into wildlife here.

Many years ago, my brother Laurie and I were on holidays in the UK, visiting family, and a few people mentioned the fact that the main thing that bothers them with visiting Oz was the poisonous wildlife. Naturally, I reassured them that it's really unusual to see poisonous snakes and spiders, they're just not as common as the media make it out.

Anyway, a year after that particular trip back home, my cousin Mandy was over here for a visit and the day she arrived we found a redback spider on the doorstep. It wasn't even hidden, it was right where it could have bitten anyone. Call me a liar.

Fast forward to 25th September 2004. We had a few family members over from the UK, My aunty Cis, my cousin's wife Sue (Cis's daughter-in-law) , and my godmother Betty and her husband Blondie. The big occasion was Donna's and my wedding (anniversary coming up, remind me in case I forget). We had everyone visiting a couple of days before the wedding for a BBQ and someone noticed a koala sitting in a tree a couple of doors up from our place. We've never seen that before or since. We often hear them during the mating season, they have a deeper call than the possums, but we rarely see them.

I'm starting to think we need to get more Porters and Goodsons over here to encourage the wildlife.

Oh, and the old Aussie cliche about kangaroos hopping down the main road in Oz, Laurie has pictures of roos in his new backyard.

Come on over and bring your camera.

Solar cooking

A few months ago I saw an article in a magazine that showed a couple of pictures of people with solar cookers. I was amazed because the cookers were basically cardboard boxes with alfoil stuck to them.

I decided I was going to try it for myself.

The pictures below are the result. I got the plans from the solar cooking archive. Mine it the Fun-panel, chosen mainly because it seemed the easiest to make.

I found the hardest part was sticking the alfoil to the cardboard, probably because I assembled the cooker before sticking it on. Next time I'll try it the other way. You'll notice the cookers on the solar cooking archive's site all look a lot neater than mine.

Does it work?

Well as I write this I have a pot of gunpowder tea brewing out in the backyard, that's it in the pictures. Gunpowder tea doesn't need boiling water, 70 degrees Celsius is enough. I checked the temperature with a digital aquarium thermometer before putting the pot on. It got up to 53 degrees Celsius before I got sick of standing there holding it and I think that's as high as the thermometer would go anyway. The pot is inside an oven bag that acts like a greenhouse and keeps the heat in. They suggest you use a dark pot as it'll absorb the heat better, but I couldn't be bothered to look for one, I was too keen to try it out.

It certainly won't cook as quick as your electric kettle or stove top, but it's a fun and environmentally friendly way of doing it.

I'll let you know how the tea tasted later.


The finished cooker


A nice pot of chai... hopefully.


The other side. The box once contained a compost bin, how's that for recycling.

Edit at 12:39 - The tea was excellent. It was definitely hot enough, now to find some recipes.