Somewhere on the Midlands Highway,

in someones front paddock, this good advice:

I should pay attention, it's been a tough couple of weeks back on the mainland. I have been feeling a little behind on my documentation of the I live with bird project and overwhelmed with reading students papers and prospective students applications- as a result the usual fear freeze.

Cafe birds #1 Brisbane

Are all cafe birds "junk birds" or just behaving like "junk birds"?

A typical Launceston bird moment

Saturday daylight savings.

After packing up at the John Hart Conservatory Fernando and I went to look at the monkeys. If you don’t know Launceston then you are probably doing a bit of a double take at the sentence.

Short story is that City Park has a zoo display of Japanese Macaques. There is a history of having animal displays in City Park and some years ago Launceston wanted to keep this tradition and so found the animal most suited to the weather conditions. Unlike the monkey park in Beppu, the monkeys are contained behind perspex walls because they have hepatitis.

Saturday was the day the clocks shifted to Eastern Summer Time; it was also the first day of the monkey being on display till 4:30 (instead of 4). We arrived at about 10 past four. The monkeys were very restless and soon started milling around the cave in the corner of their enclosure where the door is their evening enclosure. I think their body clocks where telling them that their keeper was late. Below are 4 short films of there behaviour during the 20 minutes of waiting.

Monkey #1: forlorn sitting and pacing

Monkey #2: agitated calls

Monkey #3: temporary abandonment of the waiting game

Monkey #4: waiting over

twitch tip #3

Fernando and I meet up with Ralph this morning who is the co-coordinator of the Birds Australia Atlas entries in the North of Tasmania. We had a really good conversation about birding and the Tamar Island Wetland site. We were sitting in front of the large observation window so the footage has the aesthetic of a 4 Corners program as though Ralph was a fugitive whose identity needed protecting. The quickest part of the conservation to post is his twitch tip for the Banded Lapwing- occurring more reliably in the north of the state instead of the south.

Twitch tip #2

One of the first bird stories in Launceston was the photo of the Grey Goshawk in The Examiner. I have seen Grey Goshawks, but only the grey morph, which does not occur in Tasmania. I noticed that the photographers had a Spanish last name. As Fernando, (this project curator) is part of the South American diaspora I was wondering whether Launceston was small enough that he would know all the other Spanish speakers in town, so that we could get a chance to see the bird. It is of course, with the photographers being friends of Fernando's sister Amparo. But of course, seeing birds is never guaranteed...

But at least a couple of leads to follow up..