Well the last blog seems like ages ago and we really haven’t done much. The weather did turn nasty so we have been making our way slowly north but of course travelling on the Bruce Highway is very busy and pretty much featureless if you ask me. Maybe the inland roads would be a better way for us to go🙄🙄
“Gotta Scratch” Rainbow Bee-eaters.
Male Leaden Flycatcher
Female Leaden Flycatcher
We are now just north of Townsville at Bluewater and even though it was raining yesterday morning we decided to drive back past the city and check out The Townsville Common.
The rain did stop and the sun did poke out enough to get some fantastic bird photos. It’s a great place where you could really walk your socks off……plenty of wetlands, saw an osprey nest and a sea eagle nest plus lots of different birds. Mostly they were in the tops of the trees so Anthony missed out on a lot of photos too. I’m sure the bird species list would be quite impressive for this area.
Had a great day, athough the drive is an hour one way from out here.
Maybe next time we could find a van park closer.
Alway exciting to see a Black-necked Stork (Jabiru)
White-bellied Cuckoo-shrike
Brown-backed Honeyeater
The van park here also has a little creek with paperbarks, pandanus trees etc, very picturesque and we have spotted a few birds and bugs around too. There always generally is something to get a photo off when in these little pockets of nature.
Forrest Kingfisher checking us out
Male Darter Drying out
Rainbow Bee-eater
Blue-winged Kookaburra
Great Bowerbird in Song
Slender Skimmer Dragonly
Female Palemouth Dragonfly
Female Chalky Percher
An Immature Chalky Percher Dragonfly
Tomorrow…..fingers crossed…..we will drive up the range to Paluma. A beautiful spot too but the weather doesn’t look promising but will give it a go.
Greetings from Cania Gorge National Park . What an amazingly beautiful peaceful place this is. We are camped right at the entrance to the hiking tracks, at Cania Gorge Tourist Retreat . We have been here a few times before when there was no communication reception. Recently the owners of the Retreat have splashed out and got themselves a Telstra tower installed so Halleluja, we now have phone and internet which is great.
The trip here from Pomona was very lacklustre. Typical Queensland inland roads, very bumpy, even jarring in places, of course we can’t go real fast as we don’t like bouncing all our nice things around in our (house on wheels). It was a very long day, with a lunch stop in Gayndah and catching up with some friends. We didn’t arrive here at the Gorge till round 4.30 pm.
Here’s where this story turns nasty…….
Last Light : Laughing Kookaburra at CaniaGlasswing Butterfly bedding down for the night, looks so comfy …. notRainbow Lorikeets enjoying a morning bath
When we unhitched the van, it made some really horrible creaking noises and actually seemed to be sitting way to low on the back of the truck.
We did manage to unhitch and started to look around the King Pin Box (hitch) with a torch and to our absolute horror, saw two very big cracks in the framework behind the hitch. We also noticed that the hitch had hit underneath the front of the van, as there was a chunk of fibreglass missing……which means that it was flexing a hell of a lot to do that.
After setting up we googled to see who on earth around here could possibly help us.
Cania Gorge Dam
Some more pics from Cania
(Click or press on image for larger view)
We are 26 kms from the nearest town, (Monto) and luckily found a large engineering firm there, we rang them and they are coming out tomorrow for a look and fingers crossed, can help us out of our predicament.
Oh that’s not all, it gets even worse……we really wanted to see if there were cracks anywhere else, so we had to cut the lining away and take a lot of the trim off, take out the insulation etc to even be able to see the main beam and framework that the hitch is attached to and guess what????? We found 7 cracks, the biggest is over 3 inches in the main beam.
Wow, I was so lucky to grab this Great Egret FlybyThen it landed and stood tall and proud for me to capture this shot.We spent a good hour or so being mesmerised by this Azure Kingfisher fishing at very close range.
Total concentration, unconcerned by our presence.
Just a snack
So now we are wondering how on earth we managed to get here without losing our van on the highway, talk about an absolute ship stopper, we ain’t going anywhere for a while till all this is fixed somehow. Our house is broken and unable to be towed. Of course we are devastated but after doing some massive googling find that this does happen a lot over time with 5 th wheelers and we have been travelling in ours now for 11 years.
We will certainly be keeping a close eye on this area once fixed.
This stunning male Striated Pardalote put on quite a display.
This family of Blue-faced Honeyeaters just kept on following us around, they’re so funny to watch
Adult Pied Butcherbird
Always a treat to watch a Pelican Flyby
Juvenile Pied Butcherbird enjoying our offerings
A pair of Grey-crowned Babblers
This Galah looked quite photogenic
An (introduced) Monarch Butterfly and Caterpillar
A Monarch Caterpillar
Stephanie ready for immediate action
Cania Gorge Video
Cania Dam Video
In between all this happening we have been out and about, so don’t worry…..it’s not all doom and gloom. We have been walking our socks off, seen lots of birds.
We drove to the reservoir today and Anthony got some really wow photos as you will see.
Since we will be stuck here for a while we may have to blog Cania Gorge in a series form so hang on to your hats….there’s plenty more photos and video coming, plus keep you all posted on our repair progress.
Cheers Steph and Anthony.
One of the 7 (ship stopping) cracks in the frame supporting the king pin box (hitch)
Bald Rock Creek, Girraween National Park, QueenslandThe Yellow-tufted Honeyeater. A very common bird in the ParkThe Yellow-striped Hunter Dragonflies are out and about at the moment, however their numbers along with other Dragonfly species, are very low.
There were quite a few lizards around today, including this Jacky Lizard
Well we are all set up at the Caravan Park in Stanthorpe now and will be starting the Apple thinning again next week. It’s ridiculously hot for this time of year, 30 degrees today, hard to believe. I guess we are in for a scorcher this summer.
Today we visited Girraween National Park , always one of our favourite parks, with a gorgeous rocky river, lots of rock pools, a huge rocky pyramid to climb and plenty of walking trails, you certainly can’t get bored in this beautiful place in nature. We saw lots of lizards, heard plenty of birds but for some reason we never get many bird photos here. A few dragonflies are also starting to appear which makes Anthony very very happy. He can spend hours stalking one just to get that perfect photo of a perfect pose on the perfect prop and of course with a perfect background.🤩🤩
We saw 3 Red-bellied black snakes but boy are the quick, we didn’t get any photos but I got a little snippet of one on my video, he was swimming and ducked under a rocky ledge, I wonder how long they can hold their breath because we sat there for ages waiting for him to resurface. Maybe he found a little tunnel through the rocks and made his escape. They are a beautiful snake to watch, very timid, if they see you they are pretty quick to get away.
Granite : a strong feature in this Park
It was difficult Photographing the birdlife today, they were very uncooperative
This is a Common male Archtail Dragonfly
Fairly slim pickings in the Odonata (dragon/damselflies) department
A nice variety of reptiles were spotted today
Some snippets from Girraween
So this is most likely our last big outing for a while. I guess we do have time off around Xmas but it would be pretty hot at that time and once we get into work mode we don’t seem to do much else. At the Apple orchard where we work, there is a huge lake with all sorts of birdlife visiting, Anthony sometimes goes there on our days off so we will still post some photos and of course our weekly inspirational quotes. Plus there is a very cute river in town where we also see lots of birds and dragonflies so we will still be doing occasional blogs of the amazing critters that we see when out and about. Please enjoy the pics and video.
We were visited by a gorgeous flock of Musk Lorikeets at Goomburra.
Dagg & Queen Mary Falls
Interesting monuments at Killarney
Hello Everyone,
The last couple of days have been great, good weather which also enabled us to get some much needed maintenance work done to the van. It’s hard to believe we are only now tackling some jobs that were on our must do list 5 months ago when we first left Stanthorpe🙄🙄 We still have a week before starting work again so will try a little harder to get things done.
Yesterday we re visited Queen Mary Falls, it’s such a wow place, I don’t think I could ever get sick of walking around the falls circuit, there’s really something magical about this place.
King of the pond, at the base of Queen Mary Falls
More birds from our second visit to the Falls
Our second visit to the Falls
Bell Birds aka Bell Miners seem to dominate the Goomburra section of The Main Range
Other birds of Goomburra
click or press on image for larger view
Today we managed to get up extra early and take a drive out to the Main Range National Park . This park is enormous and so many great parts to it but we went to the Goomburra Section about 45 minutes drive from Warwick. We had been there once before but it was in winter and today it was just beautiful after the rain they have had , it’s so nice and green and all the creeks are running. The drive there is nice too, lots of cattle and horse studs, beautiful country quite some kms before even getting to the park. It seems it’s calving and foal time, we saw so many gorgeous little baby animals, always a treat for me. I filmed one of the mares with her new foal,just beautiful to watch, it’s at the end of my video. The birdlife in the park was fantastic, soon as we got out the truck we could hear so many different birds and the Bell Miner birds were so loud. There’s a few walks here, we didn’t take any lunch so only did a small walk around Dalrymple Creek which was really nice. Next time we will definetly pack a picnic and make a day of it but we really had to do some shopping today as well so had to come back early.
A newly emerged (Teneral) Arrowhead Rockmaster Damselfy
Crazy Metalart on way too Goomburra
Goomburra
Tomorrow we have the big trip back to Stanthorpe. It’s only about 40 minutes drive. Work is looming, we are trying to delay it as long as possible, holidays are really hard to give up. There’s a couple of really nice National Parks south a bit so we are hoping we have time to visit those. Enjoy all the amazing pics and 2 videos this time.
Queen Mary Falls, Main Range NP. QueenslandAzure Kingfisher captured over Canungra Creek, Canungra Queensland
Some critters from Canungra (click or press image for larger view)
Well thanks anyway but I guess all that finger crossing didn’t help us. We ended up at the Canungra Showgrounds for 4 days pretty much just sitting in the rain. In fact it seemed like most of the heavy rain was making a beeline straight for us so any outings to the Lamington Ranges was definetly out and we just sat there watching the grounds slowly turn into a lake. Riveting.😳😳 We did grab our brollies a couple of times and walk into the town, this is a beautiful picturesque place normally and thankfully the rain turned a bit more patchy on our last day so we could at least pack up the awning while it was dry. We also walked around the Showgrounds which backs onto a very nice creek that was fairly flowing with all that rain. We saw a couple of ducklings caught up in the raging torrent, we couldn’t do anything to save them, they sped by so fast, the parents were flying over quacking like crazy, we just hope they all met up again a few miles down the river where the current hopefully eased off a bit. Horrible, we never think of the animals getting caught up in this torrential rain and the rivers rising so rapidly.
Noisy Friarbird, Durikai State Forest, Warwick Region
Some other birds sited at Durikai State Forest
We have been in Warwick a couple of days now and the days have been good, very cloudy and ripper storms coming through in the afternoon, but the worst ones have just skimmed past us like we have a magic shield on so we hope that continues. There’s a lot of hail, big winds and torrential rain around.
We found a nice little Billabong at Durikai State Forest just west of here towards Karara. The birds were chirping like crazy, it really lifted our spirits, so many honeyeaters there but they were very wary of us. We were very quiet and sneaky but they were on to us and soon as we got near them they flew off to another part of the Billabong. One of those collapsible bird hides would have been great here.
This was a tough selfie. Had to tie the camera to a tree branch and scramble back down in the allotted 10 second timer 😳
Queen Mary Falls, Killarney Queensland
The stunning Female Satin Bowerbird
Click or press on bird for larger view
Leslie Dam, The Billabong & Queen Mary Falls
‘A Dragon in the mist’ A young Eastern Water Dragon at the base of the Falls
More Eastern Water Dragons
Today we drove to Queen Mary Falls, about 40 minutes drive east. We have been there many times and it’s a fantastic place. The afternoons always seem better there as the sun is on the waterfall and today was a lot of birds out and about and so many of the Water Dragons. I just love them, each one is different depending on how they are camouflaged so Anthony got some great photos and I got some great video of two squabbling over something…maybe the best rock to view the falls from😁😁
It’s one of our favourite places to visit. Please enjoy the pics and video,
