Our Bluey and other critters
The critters around us seem much more exotic than those of Oregon, I guess because they are! A spider is a spider, unless you’re into arachnids, but here they are likely to be the size of a US quarter or bigger. You don’t so much walk into a web across a track as bounce off it. We met our resident bluey, a blue-tongued lizard, the other night in the garage. They are common all over Oz, growing to 16 cm or so. They’ve adapted to suburban gardens and eat lots of insects, their biggest predator being domestic cats. We see gulahs every evening at the nearby dog park. There are blooms and fruits in some of the big trees around us, so the cockatoos and parrots are busy tanking up, a noisy process. So far, no big fruit bats that we’ve spotted close by yet though.

Whose poo?
We spotted little guinea pig-like poos on the deck railing the other morning and the discovery led to a day-long poo safari. Nothing like the enthusiasm of a six-and eight-year-old for this task! After some field research, we decided it was probably from a brush-tailed possum, a common backyard denizen. We got a great book from the library, Tracks, Scat and Other Traces to help the research, and took some nature walks on the swamp trail at the bottom of our hill. We measured the scat we found with metric rulers (aha, what an easy way to switch to metrics!), drew field pictures and identified other scat in the garden. Jack and Abby’s journals are not your normal kid scribbles any longer.

Another Icon off the list
Australia’s icons are many: the Harbour Bridge, the Opera House, Uluru (Ayres Rock), and Manly Beach among the most well-known. A short ferry ride from downtown Sydney, Manly is also just a few minutes away from Narrabeen. A sunny summer Sunday at Manly is on the must-do list. It is gorgeous, packed with families on Sundays. Lifeguards with their red/yellow hats patrol the beaches to keep swimmers and surfers safe, as the surf can be treacherous when rip tides sweep back out to sea. They keep folks BTF, between the flags which they plant in the safe areas.



Headland walks
Most of the east coast beaches are bounded by headlands and we went out for a bushwalk on the Turimetta Head track the other night. Great views north and south.



Shrimp and the new moon
A fisherman told Tracy that the fishing is great at river inlets on the new moon when the shrimp come into the river mouths and the fish follow. Flatties, we think the fish are called, but more research is needed here! Anyway, the fishermen were definitely out on the Narrabeen inlet last night, though I didn’t see many fish landed.

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