Stripes & Spots–Photo Practice at Melbourne Zoo

Zebras

Booking in advance one takes a chance on the weather at this time of year, in that it could turn out to be an awful cold and miserable day.

But we struck it lucky last Wednesday, it being a particularly mild winter’s day with ample sunshine. Perfect for a visit to Melbourne Zoo, where I have not been for over 20 years or so.

Though public admittance was restricted due to the covid19 pandemic to 2500 people, there were quite a few persons in attendance mostly parents with children.  I hate to think how many bodies would have been there on a normal day, so am thankful that numbers were limited as it was easy to snap unencumbered photos of the exhibits.

Upon arrival we headed off to the right, hoping it would lead us to the big cats who according to map were over there somewhere.

On the way we came across the comical meerkats, wonderfully photogenic beasts.

 
Meerkat on guard duty

Another meerkat on watch

From there it was onward to the giant tortoise, a peculiar sculpture indicating it was nearby.

Tortoise sculpture

Giant tortoise photographed through glass

We passed the Japanese garden…

Japanese Garden

…then headed back towards the centre pathway and came across the beautiful  old 19th century carousel, which was not operating, due to covid restrictions no doubt…

Old carousel

Carousel detail

…and the Peter Pan statue, an Australian version commissioned in 1926, created by Paul Montford.

 
Peter Pan statue

Peter Pan statue (detail)

On the way to the snow leopards we passed the pelicans and penguins…

Pelican

Penguins

…and eventually came to the Snow Leopard enclosure.

Mother leopard was sunning herself high up on the other side of the enclosure and the cubs were hidden, though when we returned a bit later one cub was visible, unfortunately slightly obscured by mother leopard’s  leg.

Snow Leopard cub

The Coatis and Tasmanian Devils were not visible, so we moved on to the lions, of which there were two males, gnawing on a snack of bones.

Lion

Lion close up

Close to the lions were the African wild dogs.

African wild dogs

Moving on, the peccaries and tapir were nowhere in sight, but we soon came to the giraffes and zebras and baboons.

Two zebras side by side – stripes in tandem

Giraffes – mother and foal

Long neck

Giraffe and zebra

Giraffe head shot

Baboons enjoying the sunshine

Walking back down the left side of the zoo, we ambled through the great flight aviary where a variety of water birds were on display.

Some kind of ibis?

Some kind of curlew?

more birds

Black cockatoo

Black Swan

Duck

The cassowary was in an enclosure by itself. Strange to see one up close and note how like a dinosaur it is.

Cassowary

Next up was the elephants and the tiger.

Elephant herd

More elephants

Another elephant

Tiger

Tiger again

and again (after all it’s not every day you can photograph tigers)

We’d been at the zoo for over three hours by this time so there were only  a few more sections to visit – the monkeys and primates.

Unfortunately the gorillas were too far away to get good shots and my monkey photos were not a success except for this spider monkey.

Spider monkey

The zoo charmers turned out to be the Lemurs who seemed almost tame, unenclosed, and sitting on perches close to the public walkway.

Lounging lemur

Lemur – such a long handsome tail

Lemur in an aura of afternoon sunlight

We were somewhat footsore by the end, but it had been an interesting outing and we even ran into an old acquaintance in Arch, who has been a zookeeper at Melbourne Zoo since 1988. Keeping to the regulatory social distancing we reminisced about old times when we were part of a social group that gathered at the Dan O’Connell Hotel in Carlton back in the 1970s and ‘80s.

And it was a pleasant change to take photos of beasts other than race horses.

Renovation - Chaos with Wasps

Dining Room, Kitchen, Laundry stripped bare

We’re almost into week three of the renovations, and nothing much has progressed so far, except for the preparatory stuff. It will all start in earnest this week, with the plasterer and builder creating new walls and floors.

The rest of the house is filled with building materials, appliances and the new bathroom fittings.

Living Room – crammed with building materials

Meanwhile, we’ve been cooking alfresco, outside the backdoor on the patio which has been covered with a tarpaulin to keep the rain out.

It has most of what you need, the coffee machine, fridge, plates and cutlery and a bucket of water.

Alfresco kitchen

The washing up is done in the backyard in the old sink which B cleverly rigged up on trestles. Of course the taps don’t work – we have to boil water and transport it.

You will notice in the following photo how the grass has grown under the sink where the waste water comes out. This is despite the dishwashing detergent. What magical growing properties it seems to possess!


Sink in the backyard

It’s like camping, though surprisingly without many flies. European wasps are the main problem and they no doubt are responsible for the absence of flies. They are attracted to any foodstuffs, particularly cat food, so we have to be careful and keep the area clean and lock everything away from their depredations. B found a nest of them in the front garden (in the ground near the fence) and spent most of yesterday afternoon trying to kill them with insect spray. It didn’t work, and only succeeded in enraging them. He got stung of course, though only once. He’ll try again tonight with proper wasp killing powder and wearing protective clothing.

The cats have been coping well, Willy hardly twitching a whisker and Talya making herself scarce in one of her hiding spots the front yard, emerging, when the builders have left, to beg for food.

Cats find all the building stuff in the house interesting and worth investigating. They walk between the plaster boards leaning up against the wall in the hallway, and can’t resist climbing into the holes cut into the floor for electricity cables.

Talya considering a pile of timber flooring in the living room.

Overall we’re getting used to the limited cooking facilities and eating quite well -  lots of barbeques and salads.

I wash the clothes at the local laundrette. I haven’t been in one for over 30 years and had to ask how it operated. I was surprised at how cheap it was – only $4.00 for a wash. I had expected it to be much more as I think, in the past it was a dollar or so to wash your clothes then. I don’t bother with the dryer, lugging home the wet clothes to hang on the line. While it’s hot and sunny, why use an electric dryer. If it’s raining I may avail myself of the dryer, as there’s bugger all space to hang clothes on a clothes horse in the house.

The renovations will continue for several more weeks I assume, but I can’t wait for it to be finished.

Update Monday

Today, no wasps!

 
B in his comical Rentokil outfit – check out the head gear, a piece of ingenuity made out of  security flywire.

Finally, the wasp nest has been destroyed, or so I assume as I have seen no wasps hovering around today.

B treated the nest with the proper stuff last night, and dressed appropriately this time. He said the wasps were dormant, so he had no trouble at all. And it appears to have worked.

Butterflies & Flight Behaviour

The above butterfly is a dingy or dainty swallowtail, which I spotted browsing on the miniature irises in the front garden. It obligingly remained still while I photographed it. I don’t know why it is called dingy as it’s quite a pretty butterfly, slightly larger than the common white cabbage butterflies that are often seen flitting around the garden.

Anyway, I took the photo as it coincided with the book I was currently reading, Barbara Kingsolver’s splendid new novel Flight Behaviour, which, among other things, is about butterflies, the Monarch Butterfly in particular.

I  finished the novel the other morning and found it to be an engrossing and very enjoyable read, as good as any of Barbara Kingsolver’s earlier works.

In this book she returns to a rural location, in Southern Appalachia where not surprisingly Kingsolver lives, and sets the scene around a freak of nature, the massing of monarch butterflies where they have never massed before.

Dellarobia Turnbow is the engaging heroine of this tale, shot gun married to the boy who got her pregnant at 17, mother of two young children, living with her husband Cub on his family’s  sheep farm, with very few options for escape, hogtied to the dreary sameness of her life.

The novel opens with Dellarobia, who is prone to infatuations with men other than her husband,  on her way to finally consummate one such sexual attraction up on the mountain above her house. She is stopped from throwing away her reputation by the sight of the monarch butterflies, massing in millions up there -  a veritable sea of fire that strikes her so profoundly that she forgoes her assignation and returns home. Because she is short sighted she doesn’t recognise the butterflies as such, but sees instead a vision of  unearthly beauty.

It turns out to be an anomaly in the butterflies behaviour, the monarchs missing their normal migration location in Mexico to come together in Tennessee.

Flight Behaviour is a novel bearing a powerful message about global warming, and it is also a portrait of an isolated rural community, to whom aberrations in weather are seen as an act of god. It is more than that of course, the title of the novel refers to more than butterflies.

Dellarobia is not typical of the community she inhabits,  a religious sceptic with a rebellious streak and a lively intellect that is wasted in the life she is obliged to live.

The arrival of scientist Dr Ovid Byron to investigate the butterfly phenomenon, changes both Dellarobia’s life and that of her young son Preston.  They are both intellectually stimulated by the study of the insects and enlightened to the fate of the world in the wake of climate change.

I’ve always thought that Barbara Kingsolver creates wonderful male characters, and Ovid Byron is one of her best, charismatic and attractive, an intelligent man dedicated to his subject of study – Monarch butterflies. 

The novel is filled with marvellous scenes and set pieces, from the evangelical reaction to the butterfly phenomenon starring Dellarobia as its discoverer, though she never lets on how she came to know about the butterflies; to scenes in second hand stores where, being poor, the Turnbow family are obliged to shop, and Dellarobia’s brush with fame through a media coverage that goes viral on the internet, where she is dubbed the Venus of the Butterflies.

The tone of the novel is alternately wry and serious, the writing witty and lyrical and of course informed by Barbara Kingsolver’s lucid intelligence.

Flight Behaviour is already my favourite read for 2013, and it will take a really special book to knock it off the top of the list. Of Barbara Kingsolver’s earlier books, Flight Behaviour reminded me most of Prodigal Summer, a novel I reread regularly it being a big favourite of mine. It is also set in a backwoods rural community and also deals with environmental issues.

Wildlife in the “Burbs”

The above photo is of a blue tongued lizard, sunning itself in our front garden. There appears to be a family of them living under the house – mum, dad and babies. Willy the cat fortunately ignores them, the large ones anyway, but the local wattle birds persistently attack the lizards on sight. 

Willy eyeing off a blue tongued lizard.

We also noticed the other day two delightful little spotted pardelotes stripping bark from the honeysuckle vine for nesting material.

Spotted Pardelotes

They are a rare sight in the suburban back garden, the bulk of the avian population being blackbirds, Indian mynahs, wattle birds and pigeons, with the occasional flock of rainbow lorikeets dropping by.

Lorikeet Chick

 
Adult Lorikeet in plum tree

As you can see from the photo above, the plum tree is looking ragged and chewed. This is due to depredations of possums, both of the brush tailed and ring tailed varieties, who inhabit the garden at night. In the past, the two blood plum trees were laden with fruit during summer. For the past two years, as the possum population has grown, the trees have yielded less than a handful of plums.  The possums eat the blossoms and then get stuck into the new leaf growth, effectively eating themselves out of any future bounty. In other words, they are pests, but protected by law, so you can’t dispose of them.

The brush tail possums are amazingly bold and friendly. They saunter up to you and would even try climbing your leg, if you let them.

Willy the cat won’t tackle them, fortunately – he’d come off worse in a tussle with a brush tailed possum. He’s even running scared of the mynahs and wattle birds who are extraordinarily aggressive birds.

We have new next door neighbours, so Pinto the feisty kitten has gone to live in Castlemaine with her owners and no longer troubles our backyard . However, the new neighbours, who recently emigrated from the UK, have two cats who are due to come out of quarantine tomorrow. They are bengal/burmese cross cats, a male and a female,  so I’m really interested in seeing  them, but Willy is in for a shock.  Hopefully they’ll co-exist in harmony with the local felines.