Dead Nudibranches and Other Aussie Wild Things
I don’t want to leave Broadwater. Who would? This is the kind of place where you go to find things you didn’t even know you lost. At home, it is IMPOSSIBLE to get the solitude the people here have every day. You can’t get away from cars or jets or people talking without a huge effort. And I’m not even sure they realize how lucky they are.
Today was a pretty lazy day. We completed a chicken wire fence for some fruit trees Greg will be planting in the back yard. Those fruit trees will enjoy a better real estate location than 95% of the PEOPLE in the United States. Lucky trees. After, we took a bush walk in the adjacent national park and “lifted” some stakes for the fence we’ll build tomorrow and cleaned up a bit.
I spent the afternoon on a long beach walk looking for life in the tide pools. There is surprisingly little, given the climate. Apparently the beach is very dynamic and the pools may be covered and uncovered by sand on a pretty rapid basis. I guess I wouldn’t want to live there either. I did see a few crabs and barnacles and HUNDREDS of dead blue bottles (painful little jellyfish creatures) and nudibranches. Nudibranch may sound dirty, but its just a blue and white sea snail. It looks more like a fish, really. From the looks of it, there has been a nudibranch genocide in the Pacific. They were pointed out to me by a man who looked aboriginal and said he was part of the Watego family (of Watego Beach) fame. Nice guy. Weird running in to someone else out there. The rocks were the sedimentary remains of of forest.
I like the idea of walking on an ancient forest.
You don’t kill ants in the house here because they “help clean up.” That’s a little hard to adapt to, but I can roll with it. I can’t adapt to the curry caterpillars and the salad-pillars that keep popping up in our food. Not on purpose, that’s just the case with organic gardens. Broadwater is full of wildlife. We’ve actually had a phasagale, an endangered marsupial, as a roommate. I don’t mind him except that he’s a little noisy at night. Worse than a snorer. We’ve also had a close encounter with a wallaby, which is a runty kangaroo. He came to eat from the organic waste pile, which is created by throwing food out the window. Very hippie. I was thinking of the kangaroo/wallaby’s like deer that hop, but they’re really more like big ass squirrels. By that I mean that they’re seen as frequently as squirrels and much on things with their little hands.
– Carrie
Tags: Australia, Carrie, Travel
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