free feed

fishing bait
testing hunting skills
patience wins

This Great Egret was hanging out with two fishermen beside the Moyne River jetty at Port Fairy.

Usually these birds are observed from a distance as they quietly seek out frogs, tadpoles or other small specimens of water/ swamp dwelling life. Not this bird. It was right beside the fishermen who explained it had trying to steal bait from their fishing tackle all afternoon. At one stage it was standing on one man’s car when he hid the bait inside it. Either a very hungry or very tame bird.

It seems they had decided to share some bait with the bird when it clearly was not going to go seek its own food naturally and of course more was asked for. Maybe another consequence of changing conditions out there in nature.

river

flowing tidal water
filtering reflections
eternal nature

Dawn on the Moyne River at Port Fairy last September. This was an early morning walk Maggie and I took on the town side of the river. The sun was just rising over Killarney Bay behind the sand dunes. Port fairy is a beautiful little town however all relevant Climate Change scientific predictions have almost the entire town inundated by the ocean in the not too distant future. Whenever I now visit this town of my early childhood and where I first met my wife Jill and reflect on the happy memories I struggle to feel optimistic about Australia and most of the world addressing emissions reduction and restricting the looming dangers of decades of ignorant selfish political inaction on climate change.

daily walk

river and path
race to the ocean
water wins

Recently we took a short holiday in Port Fairy down on the Victorian South West Coast. This was a favourite holiday place for Charlie and Maggie was keen to explore the town as probably the next Afghan Hound to visit the place since 2013.

In the mornings I had to be up early as Maggie expected to go walking. Port Fairy has a unique location as a fishing fleet and tourist town at the mouth of the Moyne River with a long sand dune parallel on the ocean side for the last 3 kilometres to that mouth. A causeway connected Island on the other side of the river is home to a lighthouse and nature reserve that is a Mutton Bird rookery where thousands nest after their return Winter feeding migration from Siberia. They are late this year, in fact none have arrived yet, the worst scenario being they have all died on the flight. Hopefully they are just late however climate change effects from the feeding grounds in Siberia to rest and feed stops down the East Asian Pacific coasts could mean they have all starved on the way.

This haiku is my contribution to Ronovan Writes #Weekly #Haiku #Poetry Prompt #Challenge #277 River&Path hit this link to see all the other poetic contributions to Ronovan’s challenge

lunchtime

cockatoo

expecting some lunch

impatient

Brambuk is an indigenous cultural centre on the Southern outskirts of Halls Gap. It is the best place to begin an exploration of Gariwerd national park.  Jill was participating in a national textiles forum/workshop and her workplace was at Brambuk. Every morning for a week I would drop her off and plan my morning of hikes, haiku and photography from here. Then late morning I would return for a coffee and cake . By this time the resident wild but very tame Sulphur Crested Cockatoo gang would be waiting for their share of tourist offerings. Tame, as in walking up to the plate you are eating cake from , picking up the fork and throwing it on the ground, hoping to steal some food as one bent down to retrieve the fork. I guess this friendly behaviour was encouraged by the staff who fed them bird pellets and conversed with each one according to their name. To give them credit this table in the second photo was their table and they all waited to be served there.The polite birds each had a chair, the rest lacking manners sat on the table. After their snack they would check out anyone else eating. In an earlier post featuring this species I mentioned the beak is  quite lethal, I have known people to almost lose a finger . Conversely these lovelies would delicately take pellets from cafe staff fingers. I threw my offerings onto a chair. At times there were flocks of these cockatoos  numbering in the dozens flying around Halls Gap. The drought was not impacting on their lifestyle.

past walks

gazing down

from lakeview lookout

memories

This scene shows Lake Bellfield at the Northern end of Gariwerd. If you look carefully you will see a small settlement and caravan park on the creek below the wall of the dam.  Three years ago we stayed in a house there and each morning I would walk with Charlie up to the dam and along the top of the wall. This is where Charlie saw her first deer and I was amazed her genetic imprint immediately knew what they were and what she was supposed to do with them. IT took all my strength to restrain her.

autumn haze 

softens the landscape

lookout views

Swinging around this scene looks down towards Halls Gap, where only a year ago Charlie enjoyed many short walks around the town and became slightly used to seeing Kangaroos up close. Legend has it 2 old blokes walk up from the town to this lookout and back down again every day. I did not see them but quite a few other walkers were struggling on fairly even surfaces.

lost in time

mountain plan

lifted from the earth

eroding

This is my contribution to  RonovanWrites Weekly Haiku Poetry Prompt Challenge  88 Lift & Plan. See many more creative interpretations of these challenge words as haiku at https://ronovanwrites.wordpress.com/2016/03/14/ronovanwrites-weekly-haiku-poetry-prompt-challenge-88-liftplan/

Last week I was able to walk  in the these ancient mountains and will post more haiku/images in the next couple of days.

 Gariwerd  to the Djab warring and Jardwadjali people for thousands of years, named The Grampians by a C19th Scottish explorer, now a Victorian national park and again known as  Gariwerd. This mountain range was formed  around 500 million years ago in a tectonic collision and then re shaped in another  about 400 million years later.

See my post from an earlier visit to Gariwerd at https://haikuhound.wordpress.com/2015/07/05/gariwerd/

5 milky smooth haiku

smooth and still

no milk from this cow 

forever

1. This cast statue of a cow guards the entrance to the Black Rock veterinary surgery. There is not much call on bovine healing skills in suburban bayside Melbourne

 

cows grazing

milking has finished

smooth evening

2.  A beautiful Autumn sunset in the far West of Victoria near Yambuk.

smooth water

strawberry milkshake 

pink sunset

        3. Port Phillip Bay turns on another fascinating sunset for those who    appreciate it.

smooth singer 

milking the marrow 

from a bone

                       4. A young magpie enjoys what is left of Charlie”s bone

bright young bird

feathers like milk froth

down so smooth

           5. A fledgling Black Faced Cuckoo Shrike calls for its parents.

This is my contribution to RonovanWrites Weekly Haiku Poetry Prompt Challenge 84 Milk&Smooth. To explore creative haiku from an international array of poets visit https://ronovanwrites.wordpress.com/2016/02/15/ronovanwrites-weekly-haiku-poetry-prompt-challenge-84-milksmooth/

thinking

clear viewing

vast is the landscape

new haiku

vast ocean

horizon beckons

clear the mind

clear new year

vast as the ocean

take some time

This is my contribution to RonovanWrites Weekly Haiku Poetry Prompt Challenge 78 Vast&Clear. Access all the haiku by many creative poets from around the world at https://ronovanwrites.wordpress.com/category/haiku-prompt-challenge/

The images are from the top :

1. Looking out from Red Rock, an extinct volcano near Colac in the Western Districts of Victoria. From here one can see a number of other extinct volcanos that together make up the largest volcanic plain in the world, (possibly). This region is geologically recent in terms of volcanic activity but on-one talks about this fact. Stimulating incentive to formulating haiku.
2. That is me standing on the beach north of Bicheno on the central east coast of beautiful Tasmania, the amazing island state of Australia. If you want to clear your mind of dross spend a couple of weeks in Tasmania, better still live there.
3. Another beautiful sunset from the cliffs at Black Rock two nights ago on 6th January. No better place to think about New Year resolutions, that is think about them!

save a sunrise

 

save this memory

for a few moments

the sun will rise again

One of my rare photo’s of a sunrise. This image was captured at Portland Bay in far South West Victoria Australia. Before 1788 Australian Aboriginals would stand right here in July to October and see hundreds of Southern Right Whales floating, breaching or even scraping off barnacles directly under the cliff.

From the 1790’s Europeans came hunting the whales for oil/blubber and they were slaughtered in their hundreds, probably thousands during the C19th until  a sighting in the C20th was rare. After Australia banned whale hunting in 1968 the whales slowly began returning until now in the early C21st they are always seen, but only in the tens. The numbers of pre 1788 will most likely never be reached again.

re-birth

 

grasstree spikes

mobile phone towers

for the insects

These Austral Grasstrees, (Xanthorrhoea australis) regenerate quickly after bushfires. During and immediately after flowering the spikes have a magnetic attraction for flying and crawling insects of all types as well as feeding birds. Flies in particular go crazy around them.