Cali spotted a highly reflective chrysalis in the garden, which brought us all running. Turns out it’s the pupa of the Common Crow Butterfly, Euploea corinna. I’m hoping I’m still here when it metamorphoses.
Euploea corinna
Tag: australia
pigeon and miner
Crested pigeons and noisy miners are both abundant in Queensland. This miner apparently thought that the flock of pigeons should move on, and let them know it in no uncertain terms.
Intellagama lesuerii
The grandkids and I took an hour and a half to walk home from school (it usually takes them about half an hour). We saw lots of interesting things on the way, including a water dragon with two tails!
Elaeocarpus grandis
There’s a huge Elaeocarpus grandis tree in full flower in the park near my daughter’s house.
This rainforest tree commonly known as white quandong, blue quandong, silver quandong, blue fig or blueberry ash, is endemic to eastern Australia. It is a large tree with buttress roots at the base of the trunk, oblong to elliptic leaves with small teeth on the edges, racemes of greenish-white flowers and more or less spherical blue fruit, which are edible but bitter.
Indigenous Australians ate the fruit raw or buried the unripe fruit in sand for four days to make it sweeter and more palatable. Early settlers used the fruit for jams, pies and pickles. The fruit of E. grandis is eaten by birds, including the wompoo fruit-dove, southern cassowary and Australian brushturkey.
I have a vintage (1940s) Chinese Checkers set that belonged to my mother; the “marbles” are painted quandong seeds. It looks like this one. I am not sure if they are E. grandis seeds as there are at least a couple of dozen trees called quandong.
Phascolarctos cinereus
Exploring with the grandkids, we spotted a koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) and her joey high in the branches of an ironbark tree near their home. A lovely sighting for our last day in Australia. Today we fly home.
springbrook
Springbrook National Park is astoundingly beautiful. I can’t believe I lived in south-east Queensland for ten years and never went there; so happy that situation was rectified today.
The Park is part of the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia World Heritage Area, one of Queensland’s five World Heritage properties.
Spectacular waterfalls, lush rainforest, ancient trees, impressive views, exceptional ecological importance and natural beauty makes Springbrook an outstanding place to visit. My sketch in no way does the scenery justice. You need to go there for yourself.
morning coffee at the surf club
I popped over to the local surf lifesaving club for coffee, as one does here.
Gold Coast
Gold Coast was the last place I lived in Australia. Man, it’s changed a lot in 25 years. But the beach is still nice 😊
iconic wildlife
Enjoying the rainbow lorikeets (Trichoglossus moluccanus) in the palm trees at dawn.
This guy was on the kitchen floor this morning, barely alive. I thought it was a leaf and picked it up, then noticed a leg waving weakly. I put it outside and it must have recovered somewhat because when I came back with my sketchbook, it was gone.
Only a few more days in Aus, so it may be my last honking big spider for a while.
lemon tree very pretty
I sketched a kookaburra in the guest book at our lodgings, but forgot to photograph it before we checked out this morning. But here’s a lemon tree instead.
We’re done with north and central Queensland; our last few days in Australia will be spent in southern Queensland.
hashiworks 