ferdie and perry walk in jacana reserve this morning no words

 

jacana reserve walk

So just for the heck of it, quick deets on a Jacana Reserve walk this morning. This is Barry these days, he is too old to walk a long way, but he still has a good life, I am told.  

Ibises in the park. There were tons of them, a huge flock, but these were a little further north just a small gathering and closer to the path. I have no idea what they were all eating, but they were all eating. 

I just couldn't figure out what this was. Can you tell? 

I am kind of into this weed island, looks like Perry and Ferdie were too. The shopping trolley reminded me of how once (15+ years ago) I called the supermarket in high dudgeon and told them they had to get the shopping trolleys out of the reserve. The idiot who answered the phone said of course they would because they were worth $1000 each. I'm sure. 

Can you say fox on the isthmus six times quickly? 

fox on the isthmus six times quickly fox on the isthmus six times quickly fox on the isthmus six times quickly fox on the isthmus six times quickly fox on the isthmus six times quickly fox on the isthmus six times quickly gosh you're sly

rabbit rabbit rabbit

 

29 Jan 2023

one day soon I'm going to get a pot of black paint and finish this mural by giving all the characters sarcastic eye expressions

 

jacana reserve october/november 2014

Last Thursday the 30 October at about 5 o'clock (I'd have pictures only I didn't have my phone with me) I arrived at Jacana reserve with the dogs to see a 4WD going down the slope towards the creek, presumably having entered the reserve from either old Jacana or perhaps even from Johnstone St (which would have meant driving through the playground). I just saw it disappear over the edge of the hill; by the time I got to the edge, it was parked near the creek. There was a woman lying in the grass nearby, she had a small dog with her. At first I thought she was part of the 4WD group (i.e. they were driving down to the creek for a picnic or something) then I came to appreciate she wasn't, the 4WD people had merely driven down the hill and she was there already; if she'd been directly in their path, they might not even have known they'd run her over, let alone seen her in time to avoid her. But that's another story (or not - it didn't happen so I suppose it's not really a story at all). 

The people in the 4WD had got out with a crazy homemade three-wheeled contraption and one of them got on to ride it and they tied it to the back of their vehicle and drove up the hill. I had time to write down their registration number. I would have thought that, after nearly killing a person by driving around in a public park, they might have learnt a lesson about driving down steep hills, but in fact they returned about 20 minutes later (sans monster trike) and sped off towards the western ring road. 

I'm only in the Jacana Reserve about four - five hours out of every week, so god only knows what goes on there the rest of the time. There is a lot of mad dumping, like this broken boat which someone went a long way into the park to get rid of:

There is also, of course, the phenomenon of the motorbike riders. These are often children. They don't know it but they are part of a long tradition; when the park was investigated in the early 70s for its recreation potential a riding track for these kinds of vehicles was recommended, and built, and only demolished a few months ago. These days, these things are illegal, as I reminded muggins below when he queried my right to photograph him. This picture was taken today at 1:25 pm.

In the main, the Reserve is ridiculously under-utilised. There are probably only about 4-5 people in it at any given time, and it's a resource that almost anyone could find attractive or useful in some way.

By the way, today I saw two fox cubs on the central isthmus between the Moonee Ponds Creek and the wetlands. They were, I'm sorry to have to report, gorgeous. I was a bit ahead of Ferdy and Barry and the cubs were way gone by the time the dogs showed up. They could definitely smell them though. Below is Ferdy with his hackles up trying to figure out what's only very recently been going on...

starlight in a puddle

I took the dogs out at 6.30 this morning, much earlier than usual, and as we were crossing the bridge saw what I thought was an early cyclist heading to the city. Oddly at the end of the bridge it stopped and then went on, but I figured, just adjusting his or her apparatus. Its light went on ahead of us for some time then seemed to career off the road and into the grass, lying there. I thought the cyclist had fallen asleep at the bars... then (it was still pretty dark) I couldn't see anything but the light and a black patch. I thought I had imagined it all and I was just looking at starlight in a puddle.

Then it leapt up and ran off. It was a dog with a big light on. Charlie went crazy. It kept a distance of about 250 m ahead of us for the next 20 minutes then disappeared.

I don't know if that's an interesting story or not, but as my grandmother Mavis used to say, it was something that happened.

vent

So I was walking thro’ the Jacana Reserve this morning and I was just behind Chez Harris-Thibault when I saw a column of what I first thought was smoke rising from a mound of junk. I assumed some piskie was smoking his meerschaum early o’ the morn, naturally an opportunity to grab him by the piskie toe and claim my bonus, but in fact it was a column of vapor. I tried to capture it with my phone which is dying (note to everyone who knows me: I am going to get a new phone and could mean a new phone number, be aware). Anyway I risked (and gained) getting my feet wet wandering through the grass to see what was there and it was a mound of junk – grass and dirt junk with a bit of actual rubbish junk thrown in – and some holes, and the vapor was rising from an indefinable point in the pile, I suppose because it did not become properly apparent until some cm above the ground. There were some properly defined holes into the pile, but the steam was not obviously (as opposed to obviously not) coming from the holes.

I suppose there are two possible explanations: either the vapor is emanating from the creek that flows under the reserve and which was buried under a huge amount of household waste in the 1970s, and which is a little warmer than the air above it. The junk signifies a point at which the reserve is kind of falling in a little bit – and let’s face it the surface of much of the rest of the reserve is covered in depressions, it’s virtually a lake system at the moment. The other explanation is that foxes or rabbits or something else is living in the junk en masse (hence the holes) and were just generally heating up the air around.

What do you think?



By the way I am well aware no smokey vapour is visible in this picture but it is delightful anyway. A funny thing happened: as I say, my phone is dying. It collapsed shortly after taking this picture and attempting to send it as an email. So then I charged it up and went through the photos on it looking for another photo of the same thing from a different angle which I also took. It was not there. What was there was about 70 photos (many of them either blank or of completely blackness) most of which I had deleted over a year ago. I wonder if I will get phone calls from the past too?