Fish pond clean out

 This was a big job. The pond had not been cleaned for some time and the amount of algae and scum was disgusting. From go to wo it took the best part of a weekend, although much of that was just draining the water. I'd caught the 40 or so white cloud mountain minnows over the preceding few days and then I syphoned out the water. Thank the lord for high pressure water hose thingies, I say. It would have taken forever to have scrubbed the algae off the sides by hand and to have cleaned the scum off the pebbles but with our trusty Kartcha, I blasted the algae and scum clean right off. If you enlarge the pic above you can see what the un-blasted parts of the pond walls looked like - that was what the walls looked like all over.

 Once the gravel was cleaned, bucket load by bucket load it was put back in and the filter and fountain placed back in and the pond filled.

And there we have it. One nicely cleaned pond!  And that has just reminded me that I need to add the barley straw compound to it tomorrow to try and keep it that way!

My early Sunday morning walk to Billen Cliffs

 I have been trying to get up early on Sunday mornings over the past few months to walk to the entry to Billen Cliffs. I'm not power walking by any means but rather I do more of a brisk stroll and it takes an hour for the round trip. I begin by bidding my early morning hello to the boys, who then get terribly excited in that loveable bovine way of theirs and begin mooing for their morning treat of lucerne. I feel a bit guilty about this because it means Steve and whoever else might be staying with us is woken up by the boys' incessant mooing.

 Once I get on to Martin's Road, who knows what I might see or hear. Unfortunately on my last walk a few weeks ago (yes, I've been slack) I found a couple of casualties along the way. This black shouldered kite (which is a surprise because I wouldn't have thought it would have been a likely car victim) and

 this eastern swamp hen, which unfortunately do get hit from time to time as they like to wander out on to roads as if they own them. And often suffer the consequences. But happily, not all the fauna I saw on this walk was ex-fauna.

 And this is an example of being in the right place at the right time. I had already passed along this part of the road about five minutes prior to returning to it on my way back. No python on my first walk past. And python when I returned. The road surface was quite warm and so this fella had decided to stay put and soak up the warmth. Given that it was close to two metres long and stretched out across the middle of the road, I was concerned that it could have been run over.

So I urged it gently off the road in the direction it was travelling. Which was fortunate because two cars passed by within a couple of minutes going both directions and I suspect that this python would have joined the swamp hen and black shouldered kite as an ex-python. Carpet pythons seem to be very common in our valley. Will they stay common in the next 50 years I wonder.  I hope so.

Unexpected (and very unwelcome) visitor in the Lizard Palace

I've had some drama in the Lizard Palace of late. I noticed a couple of mice in there about a month or so ago and I thought that they might have come in via the leaf mulch that I had raked up off the edges of Martin's Road. I searched for them but didn't find them again, so I put mouse-eradication activities towards the back of my mind. However, a week or so later I discovered to my horror that one of my western blue tongues had a badly swollen arm and some small bite marks in its arm pit. The vet didn't really have much experience with reptiles and didn't know that reptiles don't produce liquid puss so the needle that she was sticking in its arm to draw out puss was ineffectual and possibly damaging (but to be fair on the vet, neither did I at that stage). She gave me an antibiotic to give to it daily but unfortunately it died a few days later.  Now I am still not sure whether it was a mouse, a rat - yes I have  now seen rats in there at night, or another of the blue tongues. Now, even though I kept a 'group' of between 6 and 12 eastern blue tongues in an outdoor enclosure when I was a kid, I have been largely unaware of the aggression that blue tongues inflict on each other. So, much so that I have had to separate my two blotched blue tongues (I am hoping that the aggression has been mating-related and I will enjoy the pitter-patter, pitter-patter of little feet soon).
Anyway, I have been setting mouse and rat traps and have managed a few dead rodents but I was completely surprised by this capture. i have since realised of course that the rodents can gain access through the chicken wire mesh of the Lizard Palace roof from the overhanging branches of shrubs but the toad could have only been raked up in the leaf litter.  I also saw to my horror last weekend one of my baby Tasmanian blotched blue tongues (well not so baby anymore, they are about 20cm long) carting around a very dead, squashed cane toad skin in its mouth, which I promptly removed from its mouth. And they're just blue tongues!

Wildlife Snippet

Stanley, the satin bower bird who lives next door at Marissabelle's flew up on to the back deck the other day while I was lolling on the daybed. He then grabbed one of the cherry tomatoes that are growing on a vine near the hot tub and flew off with it.

Operation Moo Moo

As the days have passed and no rain of any magnitude has fallen, our grazing paddock where we graze the boys, Baxter and Dexter, has grown progressively browner and the grass cover has just about died off. Although we've been hand feeding them now for a couple of months, it was time to bite the bullet and transfer them into our other, larger paddock on the eastern side of McGuinness Road. Our neighbour, Bill, has been grazing his beef steers on our paddock for the past year or so, as there is a gate on our common fence, but seizing an opportunity to close the gate when his stock were elsewhere - and after walking the fenceline to make sure there were no breaks, accompanied by our friend Liam, on one of his weekend trips to Larnook from Karragarra Island, it was time to organise the transfer.

We decided to act two Sunday mornings ago. Not only was Liam staying here but so too were Glen and Vaughan. So, with Steve and I that made five. Five against two...the odds were in our favour. It helped that they are a tad hungry all the time now (although I hasten to add that they are still pretty rotund and downright obese in comparison to most other cattle around here at present). Anyway, the plan was for me to enter their paddock with a wheelbarrow carrying some nice green lucerne and hope that the boys would follow me all the way down to the bottom of the paddock and then out through the gate, up McGuinness Road and into their new premises.  No sooner had I wheelbarrowed my way into their paddock did they gallop up to me, heads tossing and saliva dribbling in thick mucous-ey ribbons from their open mouths. They were a little more exuberant actually than I had been anticipating and it was difficult to wrestle the barrow away from them. Nevertheless I managed to move away from them and then literally run down the slope with the barrow in front of me, followed by two seriously hungry bovines.

Glen and Vaughan were positioned further down McGuinness Road to stop them from heading the opposite direction. As I expected, Dexter had no qualms in leaving the security of the paddock which has been his home for the past three years to follow the trail of lucerne but Baxter, being the sensitive and somewhat delicate younger half-brother, needed a little more coaxing. Once they were both out they calmly headed up the road, though at a slightly quicker pace. Than I had been expecting. Fearing that they would wander too far ahead and down towards Bill's place I yelled to Liam to run back up the paddock and come out of our driveway to make sure they went into their new paddock and not keep heading up the road. As their speed which seemed to reflect their general enthusiasm for loping up the road increased, I began to worry that Liam by himself wouldn't be able to do much to stop them, and I didn't want them to try and access our driveway via the cattle grid because they might have broken their legs. I jumped over the barbed wire fence and raced back through our house paddock and met up with Liam. We both guarded the road trying to shepherd them in through the gate into their new paddock.

However, they seemed reluctant to obey us and instead headed in to the rainforest garden we have at the drive, gaining access rather delicately in between a couple of large tree ferns. By this stage I was close to apoplexy as I was sure they would trample over my beloved rainforest plantings. I also new that they could actually gain access into the house paddock via this garden if they kept pushing their way through the shrubbery. I hugh tailed it around the other side to attempt to stop them. But magically they suddenly were overcome with bovine commonsense and retreated out of the garden and trotted across the road and through the gate. We closed the gate behind them and Project Moo Moo was achieved.

They've been in their new paddock for almost two weeks now and seem to be enjoying themselves. There's a fair bit of (short) grass over there and they are now spending their days grazing again and then relaxing, while they chew their cud in the shade.

Rough scaled snake 1 November 2013

Reptile Sighting: Rough Scaled Snake
Looked like a gravid female, quite thick, crossing McGuinness Road into our paddock but down near the fence with our neighbours, Cheryl and Peter's place. I was on Roger just driving up the road after rogering the lower paddock and it was about 6.30. Quite a hot day.

1448 pages of Alfred C Kinsey

One of my favourites in our ever-expanding DVD collection is the movie, Kinsey, starring Liam Neeson as Kinsey. Not surprisingly, it's the story of Alfred C. Kinsey, the sex researcher of the 1940s and 1950s who most notably wrote the volumes Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female (1953). One night after enjoying another viewing of the movie it suddenly occurred to me that the movie was probably based on a biography of Kinsey and that 'of course, there would have to be a biography or two written about him'. Durrrh. (I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed sometimes). So I Googled and sure enough I was soon entering my credit card details into an online purchase order for a Blue Mountains bookshop for my very own Kinsey biography. Now, while I was waiting for it to arrive, I was in Newcastle to see Phantom, and being the book whore that I am I spent some time rummaging through various Newcastle second-hand book shops. And, I found a Kinsey biography - the one on the right, all 935 pages of it - for $10.  I was assuming that this was the same book that I had just bought online but I thought at $10 I could afford it even if I was to receive it in the post again.  But lo and behold when my package from the Blue Mountains bookshop arrived if it wasn't a different biography, the one on the left, which was only 513 pages long. Phew!
I began with the biggie and managed to finish it in about three weeks. I then moved straight on to the other because I was interested in how each of the authors approached the subject and whether or not their interpretations varied much. The biography on the left, written by Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy is often quite scathing of the one on the right, written by James H Jones. Jones argues that Kinsey was driven by various demons which pursued him relentlessly throughout his life. These demons were what Jones regards as his essential homosexuality, his inability to really accept this aspect of his self and his penchant for sado-masochism. Jones also tended to side with a number of Kinsey's detractors about some of the aspects of his studies, particularly the way he constructed his sample of something like 15 000 case histories. Jones also argues that at least some of Kinsey's interests were less scientifically motivated and more motivated by Kinsey's own desires, such as the filming of sex acts in the attic of his house, ostensibly to collect data, just as Masters and Johnson did a decade or so later. (SBS is currently showing a series based on the lives and work of M and J, somewhat unimaginatively titled, 'Masters of Sex').
Gathorne-Hardy argues that these demons are more in the imagination of Jones than real, and that rather than being homosexual, Kinsey's sexuality was fluid and for much of his life beyond his 40s he was bisexual. (Kinsey was married happily to his wife 'Mac' who provided him with amazing and loyal support). Gathorne-Hardy also demonstrates that Kinsey had an interest in SM (indeed it was probably Kinsey who coined the term) but did not see this aspect of him compelling him so much as did Jones.
Anyway, I really enjoyed immersing myself in the life of Kinsey, as recounted through these two biographies.
I recently 'liked' the Kinsey Institute's Facebook page and I hope to visit it sometime at the University of Illinois.
I once wrote something about Kinsey in a draft of my book 'Gay Tourism' though I'm not sure it ever made it to the final version. I can remember my co-author at that time, my friend, Loykie, asking me why I had written 'The zoologist, Alfred C Kinsey'...I had been following the way by which many social scientists had referred to Kinsey, trying to locate him as a zoologist (who really shouldn't have been doing social research). And of course his PhD is in zoology and the first 20 years of his career was studying gall wasps, and he did treat the sexual behaviour of humans as a form of zoology. BUT, he was much more than this and was a humane, empathic person who was indeed a social reformer, who actively campaigned to change archaic laws which saw people imprisoned for pre-marital sex or oral sex, believe it or not.
I will continue to enjoy learning as much as I can about Kinsey and his institute.