Bat guano

Funny how things come in threes.  Up until a fortnight ago I hadn't spent more than a few seconds of my life thinking about bat guano and then suddenly it was everywhere.  I'll work backwards.

The third time it came up was kind of cute. I popped into the front living room to check out whether the screaming coming from that room was happy screaming or call-the-police-now screaming. It was happy and caused by a gaggle of sugar-crazed teenage girls. This was well after Halloween but they were still chowing down on their enormous Halloween haul. (Halloween is big here.) When I asked what the interesting mix they were eating was, they replied "Batsh*t!" and there it is above.

The second time it came up recently was that incredibly cringey news story from NZ.  NZ doesn't often make it into the news here and when it does it is always something dreadful (someone going apesh*t, earthquakes, sport) or terribly embarrassing (someone going batsh*t, Kyoto pull out, sport).  The recent incident where someone who should know better did a great impression of a dipsh*t by spouting some bullsh*t about a hotsh*t soccer player being as thick as batsh*t, was obviously the latter.  The media here lapped it up and speculated on whether he was chickensh*t when there was no apology.  I wondered whether I was the only one bothered that he'd muddled his batsh*t with his pigsh*t (though I guess I shouldn't be surprised given that he strikes me a someone who regularly confuses people of wealth with people of worth). 

But as much as I was annoyed by his muddling, offended by his lack of manners and horrified by his lack of good judgement, (Holy Sh*t! This person is the boss of a country?) it was the fact that he was technically wrong that really irked me.  I have recently found out quite a bit about batsh*t and it is not at all thick.  The real deal actually looks quite like tiny ratsh*t.

Soon after moving here we spotted tiny bats while out walking our neighbour's dog at dusk.  So I read up about the local bats in the well-thumbed tome we simply refer to as "The Book" (a guide to local wildlife) then my interest was piqued further after I noticed bat boxes in trees at various reserves. 

So when I heard that the City of Mandurah was holding a "Bat Box Workshop" and a "Bat Night Stalk" I jumped at the chance and signed up.  At the workshop I learned all about the local bats, how to construct houses for them and why these houses are necessary.  On the stalk through a local bush reserve, my family saw plenty of bats out feeding.  We learned lots more about bats from our wonderfully entertaining and knowledgeable guide and also about many other aspects of the local ecosystem.

In this part of the world we don't have the big fruit bats that many of you will have seen in the eastern states of Australia.  The bats here are micro bats, and yes, they are very small.  Below is a picture I borrowed to show you just how small they are.

Image: www.gobatty.com.au

Man-made homes are necessary because with urban expansion mature trees get felled and then there are no longer enough suitable nesting sites to house the bat population.  Bat numbers have therefore dwindled but the key thing is that Mandurah does still have masses of food for these bats because micro bats eat mosquitoes!

The facilitator of the workshop and guide of the walk, Joe Tonga, has therefore designed and created artificial homes for the bats.  His latest design has been developed over many years and many, many prototypes and has lots of very clever features.  One of these is the angled front to the box so that the bat guano falls straight out the bottom of the box so that even after many years of use, the entrance doesn't get clogged up.

Each one of these bat boxes can house 100 bats and each bat can eat 1000 mosquitoes a night.  Bat boxes are being installed in many reserves but they can be installed in home gardens too.  Evenings in Mandurah would certainly be considerably more pleasant if thousands of Mandurah gardens had bat boxes, the bat population was able to increase again and the local mosquito population was brought back under control.

My partner had a birthday recently.  Sometimes I find that men of a certain age can be quite tricky to buy presents for but this year I bought him one of Joe Tonga's latest design bat boxes. (If you live locally then you can too from www.gobatty.com.au and I highly recommend going on one of his Bat Night Stalks.)

Image: www.gobatty.com.au

Thankfully my partner thought that his present was topsh*t.  No sh*t, well at least not until some bats find it, move in, then eventually cover the ground below it with plenty of their guano.

The coolest thing

Hello, my name is Deidre and I am a rocky shore addict.  I've been this way ever since finding an octopus in a rock pool as a child.

On Sunday my family set off on their bikes to the local beach to explore the local reef.  I haven't yet replaced the bicycle I sold in NZ before moving here so stayed at home with a giant L on my forehead to do laundry and make a curry for tea.  And what do you know?  They see an octopus and a cuttlefish in the rock pools.  Naturally I was insanely jealous. 

It is school holidays here and also unseasonably toasty, so the very next day I packed us up with swimsuits, hats and sunscreen and set off to explore various watery spots.

First we went to the same reef the children had been to the day before, but alas it was too windy and the tide was too far in.  Next we set off to an estuary-front spot that I'd spotted on the map but hadn't been to before.   I liked it but apparently it was also too windy.  Then we went further down the estuary to Dawesville to our favourite octopus-spotting spot, but sadly it was also too windy for any sightings. So we went across to the coast and stopped at Falcon Bay for an icecream and a walk on the reef there.  We saw lots of anemones and not much else so I had a mock paddy and jumped up and down and said "I want to see an octopus!"

To which my son replied, "Um.  Mum.  Like that huge one by your foot?" 

And there it was.

For ages we watched as it fished around in the rock pool.  Then as the tide came in and washed waterfalls of water from its pool to the next, it gracefully upgraded to the next pool and the next.

We watched for ages as the octopus made its way across the reef with the incoming tide.  The whole experience was extremely cool. 

But the very, very coolest thing of the day is that we did all this with the company of another 12 year old girl.

Yes, my daughter who so dearly misses her lovely NZ friends and classmates, has a new friend.

As they swam in their clothes and laughed and squealed like giant girls, I thought about how if you are lonely in paradise, well, you are not actually in paradise at all.
 

Going to the zoo

The first time we took our then very small children to Australia, we we took them to a zoo.  We went to a big, swanky, well-known zoo, paid a fortune for the entry fee, then several extra fortunes for "close encounters", photos, animal food and lunch. We clutched the huge map and raced miles from one end of the park to the other in the scorching-for-us (mid-winter) sunshine to catch various feeding times and jostled with huge crowds of people to see handlers wrangle various animals.

The day was a complete disaster.  The zoo itself was fantastic, but simply too much for two tiny children to enjoy.  I remember one hilarious-in-retrospect scene where we adults chastised the children for moaning about having tired legs, being hot-and-bothered and at their lack of interest in the hundredth species of fancy rat of the day. We instructed them to "Be grateful!" and "Hurry up and have fun!".  In reality, the most fun the children had all day was sitting in the shade with an ice block while enjoying the antics of various wild birds trying to eat our lunch.

You certainly won't have that sort of experience at Marapana Wildlife Park.  My children and I went there recently and had a fantastic time and not just because my children are now much older.  The entry charges are extremely reasonable and at first I was surprised that we weren't given a park map, then I turned around and saw that that is because there is no need.  Marapana is a small wildlife park.  This is a good thing!  There are not huge numbers of species at this park, but certainly enough to serve as a great introduction to Australian wildlife plus some introduced species also found locally. 

But the best thing about this zoo is that it is a petting zoo.  On entry visitors are each handed a bucket of animal food and brief instructions about which few animals not to feed. Visitors are able to pat and feed many of the animals making this a quite different experience from the other zoos I've been to in Australia. My favourites were the wombats.  I realised that on all my various trips to zoos over the years, the most I'd ever seen of a wombat was its backside poking out of a log. 

Several times when we were wondering about some creature, the zoo staff would casually come up and explain the history of a particular animal, the status of this species in the wild, the reason behind some behaviour or describe its unique breeding habits (leading to fun chats in the car on the way home...).

There is a lovely casual, relaxed atmosphere at this zoo and I highly recommend a visit, even if you just go for an hour or two.  It would have been the perfect place to take my tiny children to all those years ago. This zoo is not at all flashy, in fact some bits are a wee bit huckery, but sometimes that when combined with small, hands-on, friendly and inexpensive can be a unique and winning formula.

(And please excuse these photos.  Just like the day years ago when our video recorder went bung and much to my embarrassment the technician removed a piece of jammy toast from it, so after hours of reading my camera manual and taking test shots, I looked at the lens and found a once-edible substance smeared all over it.  Mmmmm, not nice.)

Dolphins

Life is full of mysteries.  One such mystery is why dolphins - more than any other animal on the planet - have inspired so much truly dreadful merchandise.  Sometimes when I am bored I play a game called "Find a cool dolphin thing".  There are no winners in this game.  I have yet to find a single piece of dolphin merchandise that I think is cool, but I love to be proven wrong, so if you ever find one, then please do send me a photo.  If I was a tutor at a design school I would amuse myself by setting my students an assignment to design a cool dolphin thing, because I suspect that it simply isn't possible.

The reason this mystifies me so much is that I appreciate as much as other less bitter and twisted people, just how cool it is to actually see dolphins in the wild.  That day when we went to the Dawesville Channel to see where the whales had been we didn't actually see any whales, but it didn't matter.

Because we did have a beautiful walk on a beautiful evening,

and we saw more dolphins in half an hour than I had seen in my entire life to that point.

And it was seriously cool. I go so excited that I took hundreds of uncool photos of rippling water where dolphins had recently been,

before I actually managed to catch one measly image of one.

The dolphins came right into the canals off the channel.  The canals are deep and have very steep sides and the dolphins were leaping out of the water right next to us.  We dubbed them a "plod" of dolphins as they were just meandering around so slowly and lingered for so long.

One of the dolphins we saw had some major damage to its dorsal fin.  After being told of a possible cause of this from a holidaying marine biologist, I have a new thing to add to my "Not To Do" list: Run over a dolphin with a jet ski.  Because that would be uncooler than the even uncoolest dolphin ornament yet created.

Whales in the Dawesville cut

The Dawesville Channel (also known as the Dawesville Cut or just The Cut) is an enormous man-made channel between the Peel and Harvey estuaries and the Indian Ocean.  It is just a few minutes drive from where we were staying when we first arrived here and a few minutes more from where we are living now.  The channel was created to solve long-standing problems with toxic micro algae growing in the estuaries.  (Background information about this issue and the solutions can be found on Wikipedia here.  To see an ABC report from earlier this year about the ongoing effectiveness of the channel and problems with the health of the estuaries go here.)

This week Southern Right whales were in the channel accompanied by several local dolphins.  Reports vary on how many whales were there with some reports saying three whales and others four.  Apparently this isn't such a rare occurrence but how special is getting such an amazing view of whales from land! 

Wildlife officers have been keeping a close eye on the whales because while the channel is deep enough for them, the estuary itself is very shallow.  News reports say that the whales are not in trouble or distress and swim in the channel to scratch their bellies. Reports and photo galleries can be found here and here.

This afternoon after school we are screwing up the "To do" list and going down to have a look just in case they are still around.

Everyday creatures

I'm sure the locals can easily spot us new-in-town folk.  We are the ones going "Oh look, pelicans!" and "Oh look, blowies!" (the incredibly common puffer or blow-fish) as we walk through town.

There are two zoos near here and next week I plan to take the children to one of them.  I'm sure it will be interesting and enjoyable, but for me nothing beats seeing wildlife just getting on with their lives in and around town while we are on our everyday outings.

One day last week we saw Ibis, Galahs, Peewees, Honey-eaters, Wagtails, Twenty-eights (Ring-necked parrots) and lots more birds we don't know the names of so just call "budgies" before we even left the house in the morning.  We set off to do various chores.  On our way we saw a bizarre sea slug, dozens of donut-shaped jellyfish, dozens of blowies, huge schools of fish diving out of the water with a Snakebird (Darter) in hot pursuit, a flock of crazy-haired Crested Terns having a spot of argy-bargy, an iridescent Blue Wren, White-faced Herons, a flock of Car-alarm birds, a Squawks-like-it-is-getting-murdered bird, a Drives-me-mental-as-sounds-identical-to-my-new-cellphone bird (OK, those aren't their real names) and lots and lots of budgies.

Next we went to view yet another rental home; Outside on the verge we saw six kangaroos sleeping under shady trees.  The house turned out to be the the first one I've seen that I could actually imagine living in (sober), so to celebrate, the children and I set off to revisit some creatures we'd seen a few days earlier.

WARNING: Stop reading now if you also love seeing creatures in the wild and get jealous easily.  See a few days earlier we went to the south Mandurah suburb of Dawesville and walked along a boardwalk across the estuary shallows.  There, just 1 metre below our feet, going about its business in about half a metre of water, was an octopus.  This was no seafood pizza type tiddler.  This octopus was a proper big aquarium-style number. We watched in awe as it arranged and rearranged itself in its rocky home.  There was no wind so the crystal clear water was smooth as glass and we had a perfect view.  Finally we left it and carried on the walk only to spot another large octopus.  When we finally made our way back to where the first octopus had been we were a bit disappointed to find it no longer there.  But a quick scan around and we saw it about three metres away in an area that was obviously its dining room as scattered all around were dozens of dismembered crabs.  The octopus gracefully shot back to its rocky home and squeezed back inside.  Amazing.

When we went back a few days later we didn't spot it again because the tide was further in and the wind was whipping up the water.  Never mind.  On the way home we stopped at various beautiful lookout points and consoled ourselves by seeing stilts, stints, swans and shelducks, a Great Egret, a dozen pelicans synchronised swimming, a tree weighed down with several hundred cockatoos (guffawing like they'd just been told the funniest joke ever), another flock of Getting-murdered birds, lots and lots and lots of budgies and.... a pod of dolphins.  And yes of course we excitedly shrieked "Oh look, dolphins!" to the amusement of the locals.

Can't wait until spring when the snakes wake up.