Christmas in Denmark - A Snap Freeze Experience

As always I had my usual summer escape to the cold end of Europa over Christmas - hereby once again highlighting the severe delay this very blog suffers from. In Denmark we statistically get ca. one white Christmas per 10 years i.e. the ground actually being snow covered on the 24th of December. A usual hobby of ours is to follow the various meteorologists publishing the probability of getting a white Christmas all the way through December - 2010 was different, very early on the bookmakers could stop taking bids, everyone knew it was going to be a very very cold white 2010 X-mas.


Danish winters teach you some good lessons in life, a couple worth highlighting here are: Eat well - it helps keeping you cozy and warm, and the other one is to get your lazy carcass outside every time there is just a hint of sunshine, you never know when the sun will be shining again. I have had heaps of joy following both of these rules of life! ;-)


As hinted above, this years winter was indeed something special. A delta T of -50 hits hard when you have slowly started adapting to the Australian temperature of life. A day after having been exposed to a leisurely 35°C in Sydney, I found myself in a very different habitat sporting a temperatures down to -17°C, I managed to capture the thermometer in the car in previously unseen territory of -15°C, you will have to trust me on the additional 2 degrees of frost.



A cold crisp Danish winter day is actually surprisingly good for a solid walk, as long as you keep yourself moving and dress wisely it is pure joy. The wise choice of cloth should include a "system" that keeps your fingers warm and still allow you to press that trigger ... I need to upgrade my equipment in that regard, holding 3 kilo of ice cold metal will make your fingers numb instantly when the mercury is in the minus two digits range.


I managed to squeeze in a bit of ice birding during a visit to a historically early frozen Limfjorden - normally this stretch of inland water in the north of Jutland does rarely freeze solid and of the few times this have happened before in my lifetime, I do not recall it ever happening this early in the year.


Birding during such conditions you have to be careful not to stress the birds, the last thing you want to happen is the birds having to burn precious energy fleeing their position because you pushed in to close trying to get a better shot. They are already stressed by suddenly having lost their natural defense against the usual 4 legged predators - foxes in particular - having access to their now landlocked roosting areas away from the coast.


A snow dressed Danish winter landscape, with high blue sky and crisp air is a pretty beautiful sight - quite lucky, since resent events means that I will probably soon have to spend a bit more time under such conditions.

Royal National Park

Things have been incredible busy around here during the last few months and once again I have have had a hard time balancing the act of getting out there exploring and the task of getting it all written down and documented. Hopefully this blog post will be the first of a quick series of postings that will bring me nearly up to date ;-) One can only hope.

Some time back I did a few walks with the Amoores in the Royal National Park, here is a little sum up of the highlights. The Australian summer do not invite for big excursions into the wilderness – you simply cannot carry the water needed for big walks, and relying on picking water up along the way is risky business – those small creeks have a nasty tendency of going dry when exposed to hot Australian summer weather.


A national park pass is a great idea, particular if you are doing short one day trips out of Sydney, since all of the parks around the metropolitan area is covered by the little sticker – in particular The Royal National Park down south of Sydney, aka “The Royal”.

The coastal national parks close to Sydney all delivers a great combination of the raw power of the sea mixed with spectacular sandstone cliffs, windblown heath and pockets of bushland. The mix in landscape ensures suitable habitats for a broad variety of wildlife. The Royal National Park is the biggest and arguably the most impressive of them all - not much beats a wander along the roaring sea, seeing how the waves pounds the sandstone cliffs, while White-bellied Sea-Eagles soars above :-)

These trips to the Royal National Park were indeed more for the joy of getting out rather than us targeting specific birds or other wildlife and as always, when you get out of your hobbit hole things starts happening around you and it is not necessarily what you expected to find.

The coastal heath delivered the usual gang of birds. You seriously have to admire how the New Holland Honeyeaters have conquered every single stretch of scrubby coastal heath on the NSW east coast, so much indeed that I have finally stopped taking those NHH photo, where a daring individual sits high, exposed above the scrub, taking looks at those camera slinging travelers passing through his windblown habitat. Instead I concentrated on the fantastic explosion of color, that was added to the otherwise dull scrubby green heath by a larger than normal presence of wildflowers.

I have tried to avoid it for years when it comes to wildflowers, but as with the birds and the other stuff I take photos of it all becomes more interesting when you start naming it. Pretty photos are all good, but if you can add names, then you also get the stories and the insight. So here we go, with great help from the all knowing internet I am willing to risk it and name the wonderfully red and white colored beauty above as Native Fuschia or Fuschia Heath, Epacris longiflora. Easy - even with next to no Latin skills it makes sense to name these elongated flowers "longiflora" i.e. long flowers.
The Rush Fringe Lily, Thysanotus juncifolius, below was actually the reason why I started looking for wildflower names - it is a stunningly beautiful flower and I simply felt that I needed to put the effort in to at least name this little gem. Next time I promise that I will bring the macro lens for some more appropriate close ups. The flower only last one day, but there are probably a couple of neighbors slightly out of sync, if you need more than 24 hours to return.


The strange looking "flower" below is from the Drumsticks & Conesticks family, Proteaceae. Spending some time online I have reached the conclusion that this one is the Narrow-leaf Drumsticks, Isopogon anethifolius.


A tip from a guide book steered us up along a little fresh water creek, through some scrubby bush and suddenly we were at our own private little waterhole, with waterfall, shade and some very confident and photogenic Water Dragons, Physignathus lesueurii.


The level of confidence should be pretty clear from the photo below - if food is on the other side and the way has been blocked by a shoe I will just have to climb the shoe .. and the fact that the shoe was well and truly attached to the leg of a human, that did not try to sit particular still, was of less concern :-) Not even the pregnant member of our little bushwalking gang showed that much lust for food.

A final treat, was the spotting of yet another wildlife species lured in by the power of food. While sitting eating on the sloping rocks bordering the waterhole tiny amounts of food must have dropped into the water, because suddenly a crayfish, Euastacus, emerged from the deep, searching for a meal. It was so eager indeed that strategic placement of crumbs in hard to reach places, nearly lured it out of the water.

Great stuff, once again the Royal delivered! These trips are very much a testimony to the fact that if you get out, you might not always see what you expect, but you will see something exciting.

Bowra Station - Creatures of The Night and Going Home

My last night at Bowra Station and I was out with the macro lens again. As always it was all happening, the creatures of the night very performing yet another fantastic show. To get an idea, while standing doing my cooking I literally had to be careful not to step on frogs that were busy jumping around trying to find a good spot for their nightly serenade performance.

A welcome abstraction from the frogs was a couple of geckos that had decided to call the shearer's quarters home, I believe they are Tree dtellas, Gehyra variegata. Old wooden buildings in the outback seems to host all kinds of exciting wildlife, the huntsman below had saved itself lots of work by catching dinner early.


The strange looking insect above gave me a bit of trouble, but it is probably a Mole Cricket Gryllotalpa brachyptera. Funny little thing that has the looks of a great digger - which it apparently is! - but it can also swim and fly, my first impression was that it looked a little front-heavy for such exercise, but nature will constantly surprise :-)


If you see frogs there will be snakes! - at least that is a saying I have heard plenty of times down here in Australia. I will say straight away that I did not see any snakes at all, I am sure they were there, but I well and truly missed them .. as it often happens with snakes. I had been slightly surprised when I realized that the campsite was directly up against the local swamp and with the amount of frogs around Bowra, and in particular around my tent, I must admit that I had checked the zip in my tent thoroughly before going to sleep. However, none of the other happy campers had seemed to worry so I did not want to be the "scared foreign tourist" and just adapted to the situation by performing the before mentioned extra check of the zip and my little "clean the boots before putting your feet in them"-routine in the morning. This second evening I had practically forgotten of the chance/risk of meeting a snake when a new Australian visitor arrived. After overlooking the campsite it was pretty clear that the shearer's quarters seemed much safer and I soon found myself in a weird situation trying to explain that "nah, you are unlike to see a snake and why should those snakes try to get into your tent?" and "they would not have placed the campsite here if it wasn't safe" .. arguments that I had used the night before convincing myself that it was all good :-D


After another great sleep, I was treated with the most fantastic sunrise. One of the first birds of the morning was a Major Mitchell's Cockatoo circling the campsite while making sure that no one could be in doubt that dawn was breaking. When the morning sun hits an agitated Major Mitchell's Cockatoo with raised crest, it is a great idea to have your camera ready, since this subdued colored bird becomes one of the most beautiful birds in Australia.


I had to leave Bowra, it was tempting to stick around for another morning, but when it comes to driving I very much like to have good time so that I can allow myself to stops along the way if something looks interesting - and after a little fueling trip to Cunnamulla the day before I was pretty sure that I would be seeing predator birds along those morning outback roads.


Indeed I did! Swarms of grasshoppers being exposed on the bitumen were easy pickings and had lured an excellent selection of large birds to land. Approaching slowly in the Magna seemed to be the best way of getting in close, but every move I made was being monitored and it was not appreciated when I rolled the window down and got the lens out.


I had another great encounter on the way home, approximately 50km south of Cunnamulla 2 Brolgas flew across the road - what a fantastic bird the Brolga is! Unfortunately the Magna had reached cruising speed and being alone in the car I felt it was to much of a job to control the car while shooting photos out the window. Luckily it is one of the birds, I have seen and taken photos of before.


I love driving in the outback, it is heaven compared to sitting in a queue in Sydney using 50 min doing the 18km to work knowing that you will have to spend the same amount of time going home later that day. You set the cruise control and keep an eye out for monitors and Brolgas and otherwise it is all easy ... except when trouble strikes!

There I was looking out for those monitors trying to cross the road when suddenly the road quality rapidly deteriorated. I remember sitting there thinking "this piece of road is pretty bad - they should do something about it". A quick glance in the mirror did however reveal that not only was the road bad, the Magna was belching out smoke from the right hand rear tire ... Time for a wheel change! Apart from spending a bit of time giving the Magna some new rubber, the trip back home went extremely well. I managed to make it all the way home to Coogee and all in all the long weekend escape to Bowra only cost me one extra day off from work - what a fantastic way to use a long weekend - Sitting here writing about it I get a very strong feeling of having to do something like that again.

All good! This is the last Bowra post from my 2010 trip, I will try to hurry and get the blog more up to date, however, generating "new material" for the blog has even higher priority.
Out of more than 2000 photos I have included 130 in my Bowra Station Picasa Album, a large part of them have been used in these Bowra Station blog posts, but feel free to follow the link below to see them all.

Bowra Station