A Miscellany of Beasts

 A pair of magpies have shared Maryville with us since we moved in five years ago and each year they nest and generally produce one youngster which we hear calling pretty much for much of the day begging to have its mouth filled with tasty morsels. The parents are doing it tough this year because it's so dry and there doesn't seem to be much in the way of insect tucker around. So they often hang around the back verandah hoping to get lucky. The youngster was on the lawn on front of the house yesterday (the photo is of one of the parents) and we were a tad concerned it wouldn't be able to fly back up into the nest, but it seems to have accomplished this.

 Two of my Tasmanian Blotched Blue Tongues enjoying the overcast conditions yesterday. I got these in February from a breeder in Brisbane and they were about 8-10cms long. They have a distinctive and quite attractive reddish-orange tinge to their heads.

 This spider's web caught my eye the other morning as the light from the sun picked up the geometric lines of the web. Astonishing really, isn't it.

 OK, so this isn't actually a beast. Or the construction of a mini-beast. Now I'm going to call this a Brazilian Cherry but I'm not sure that's correct. Anyway, it's covered in fruit at the moment and I helped myself to half a dozen of these this afternoon. The fruit is a bit tart but I like it.

 We've been visited by a couple of pairs of king parrots over the past few weeks. OK, so this, as are most of my pictures these days, was taken on my iPhone, so I wasn't able to zoom in on it, but you can see it dangling off the frangipani. The kingies seem to be attracted particularly by the seedpods of the zigzag wattles which are hanging off the wattle trees. They are such lovely parrots.

As are these guys, of course. A small flock of about a dozen yellow tailed black cockatoos flew into Maryville this weekend and when I was doing a walk around the boundary fence of our paddock on the other side of McGuinness Road, I was able to walk up to a big wattle tree in which four of the birds were perched. My attention was drawn by this little guy (a bub) who cried for food for all the time I was watching them. The youngsters are very noisy when they are hungry and incessantly squark/whinge for food. Mum or dad was too busy ripping open a branch looking for grubs to pay this little fella any attention. You can see the golden flowers of the silky oak behind it. The valley is very colourful at the moment with silky oaks, jacarandas and Illawarra flame trees all in flower.