Twitching

Wednesday, 8 August 2012

Yesterday morning, it was another early start to the day with a visit to the Cairns Botanical Gardens for the weekly bird watching tour. Of course, the best time to see the birds is very early in the day! Along with two other couples, we were met at the Visitors’ Centre by John, and his large telescope, and only walked a few metres before stopping and looking. The first thing to catch our eyes was the beautiful flame of the forest vine – then we started looking for the birds. It was amazing how many different ones we saw, simply by standing and actually looking. John even knew where a pair of Papuan frogmouths could be seen, quite up close and personal. We were constantly being told, “There goes a fig parrot!” but after two hours of this comment, came to the conclusion WE weren’t going to be so lucky.

We were led through the Gondwana section of the gardens, with the scrub fowls, ferns and mosquitoes before heading for the more open grassland areas across the road in the Centenary Lakes area of the gardens. Plenty more birds to be seen in this area, including a family of bush curlews (or thick knees), along with the possibly crocodile infested waterways and lakes – and a few more mossies. Thank goodness for the liberal application of Bushmans!!! This whole area is lovely to walk through at any time, and the bird watching only added to the experience. We concluded the tour by returning to the Visitors’ Centre via the “swamp” with its magnificent paperbarks.

During the afternoon, Les took the car to Beaurepaires to have the tyres rotated and re-aligned. Evidently, potholes and corrugations do something unpleasant to wheel alignments. The day concluded with our usual game of bowls at Edge Hill but this week there were no prizes coming home with us.

Wednesday morning we said goodbye to Eva and her family as they headed for Port Douglas. The remainder of the day has been a holiday while Cat struggles to come to grips with his feminine side.