Dodo Au Go-Go

This was originally going to be a blogpost about the arrival of spring. Then I realised I had quite a few bird adventures and stories and photos from the past couple of months to share, so I figured I would make it a bird-brained post.  Then, I was originally going to include all my plover stories in the post, but it became really, really long. So the Plover Adventures got their own separate post.  And now, working backwards, here are some of the birds we've had the joy of seeing during winter and spring 2022 in our back garden,  here in Brisbane. The Heron One glorious winter's day in late July, our backyard was visited by this lil guy. I found out later it was a white-faced heron, the most common heron in Australia apparently - though I'd never even seen one before.  We watched for ages as it grooved all over the garden, paddling the overlong grass and weeds with its feet to disturb bugs and scoop them up to eat. LittleOne and I...

Thursday, 16 September 2021, was apparently #PloverAppreciationDay. And never have I appreciated a day or an animal more. Screenshot from @wireswildliferescue's Instagram. Plovers are lovely, long-legged Australian birds which can fly, but which choose to nest on the ground. During August and September, a certain plover family have been a regular backdrop in our daily lives, and I may have become midly obsessed with them. Here's how (and why).  In mid-August, while taking my LittleOne and Indi-girl for our usual evening walk, we walked past the nearby primary school grounds, which includes a lovely green oval. Some people use the oval to play cricket or football with their kids, or go jogging, or walk their dogs - the usual sorts of things people use big green spaces for. As we walked past the oval, I realised there were two plover on the oval cackling their warning cries. We weren't close to them and in fact, Indi was far away enough to have not even registered...

For me, August in the Old World (i.e., the Blue Mountains in New South Wales) meant gritting your teeth to get through several more weeks of harsh winter cold. Here in the new world of sub-tropical Brisbane, it means different, quite subtle changes marking the move into greater warmth and t-shirt-days-and-jumper-nights, before landing into the full humidity and heat and summer.  This has been my third spring in Brissy, and between that and lockdowns galore, I've been able to observe and enjoy the big, tiny changes of the world around me.  I've written separately about our bird observations - and separately again about our plover adventures , which were a big part of this year's spring season. Here are some of our other, easy-to-miss experiences about the slide into spring. It's easy - and almost essential - to have a Poinciana tree in Brisbane. I call the one in the backyard our magic tree. There was one across the road where I grew up in Mauritius with great big shock...