August 2017

Another fun time filled with busyness.

What has happened?

We are official members of the Rural Fire Service now! Still got some training to do before we are allowed to fight fires, but its happening.

We have also been active with the WIRES aimal rescuing. – Cute pictures will follow. There have been a bunch of challenges coming up around the 12 month anniversary of me getting up here. Health has been a problem for me. I have been seeing a new doctor who feels that there may be some kind of issue with my CNS that is causing all my complaints, so we are following a new line of investiations to see if that can help. Trying to stay active and get stuff done while dealing with consistent pain is challenging. We broke the water tank moving it up the hill, so we have some water issues at the moment, and have to get a new tank, Iwill detail those mistakes with pictures later on. Vipassana has been amazing, its been helping me enjoy life without letting negativity in. I have been realising more and more how every time I sit down to meditate, the thoughts are entirely different, the challenges are completely different, its like I am a different person in every moment, but the actual me, the observer behind the experience is the same, which is making a clearer understanding of how everything is impermanent and illusory and what that means, how the priorities Ichoose should change. Its a hard thing to describe, but it is really beautiful. Anyhow, now I am off to Vipassana for 30 days. Ill update after then.

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My first rescue that didn’t end in euthenasia! A very cute young echidna.

…

He fell in an old topless below ground rainwater tank.

Lovely.

And hes in the shade safe to leave when he wishes.

So this resuce was unsuccessful. A Squirrel Glider that got caught on a barbed wire fence.

Really awful injuries from barbed wire. This one had torn the flying edge of its petaggium (skin flap between legs for gliding.) Apparently holes can heal but if the flying edge tears it will never heal and poor fellow will never fly again. The barb wire is really awful to remove. Skin pinches between the coils between the barbs and the barbs puncture, and they struggle to get off which just makes it all worse.

This is a little baby paddemelon, made it into care after mum was hit by a motorcycle.

Cute paws.

This is ajoey wallaby.

What a face.

Much older joeys, these guys are in ‘high school’ where they get to roam around and eat the grass in a large enclosure.

Im not sure who is enjoying the bottle more.

Obligatory after bottle cuddles. For digestion.

So alert!

This poor fellow shares a pouch with his best friend, who has pooped all over him. Pooping in the pouch is the height of bad manners.

No poop on this one.

And this is what happens when you poop the pouch.

This girl was a successful release, you can see shes got a joey of her own. She was ill and had to be kept in care longer than would be ideal and as a result she is a little too familiar with humans, and is hopeful for a bottle of her own.

This is a St Andrews Cross Orb Weaver that lives next to our water heater. This was a little experiment that showed me that leeches can unstick themselves from spider web.

Poor spider used a lot of web trying to catch the leech so Igave her a mealworm to rejuvinate with. I was also trying to get some photos of her orange spinarettes.

Those spinarettes retract when she’s not using them.

Nailed the focus! Happy with that shot.

Beautiful spider.

Yellow tailed black cockatoo. These guys apparently are the harbingers of rain. They love to rip apart tree branches looking for grubs.

They look like they are playful and love doing what they do. They are also really big!

Brown huntsman from our house.

We love our spider friends and protectors.

This is a sad echidna with dermatitis. We took him to the animal hospital at Currumbin for treatment.

Thisis a big pile of cactus recovering from living in the rainforest.

My line of cactus gets ever longer.

We cleared the area back at the bananas. Looks so much nicer, and we uncovered massive hollow logs and pretty ferns. Planted some dragon fruit by the stump back there.

I was shown a good lantana clearing technique where you lift the mass so you can rip out the roots and just keep rolling it into a big mulchy pile that will stop my soil washing down the hill. Hopefully.

You can see the massive red cedar log that someone cut down and left to rot. Im hoping to grow Monstera Deliciosa all over it. (Fruit salad tree)

Theres also a couple of banana suckers we planted, and you can’t see them but theres a few kinds of passionfruit planted back there too.

This whole area was lantana over my head, now its all rolled up over the back of that log.

Looking down the embankment behind the dragonfruit. There’s a seasonal creek down there and lots of treeferns. Future explores down there!

Upslope from the bananas I cleared (you can see the lantana pile)

I planted flowering natives, we have a little native bee hive nearby, so hopefully I can cultivate this area into a native flowering food area for the animals to enjoy. We have a trail several meter above this area so we would be able to observe them all without intruding.