Look who came to the party

[fivemack]

There was a special offer on lemons at Sainsbury's, and I remembered that various of my friends had expressed various levels of irritation at the way that all lemonade in shops contained artificial sweeteners, so I made up a large quantity of lemonade and threw a party.

[one coffee-cup full of sugar, one coffee-cup full of water; put in a pan on a gentle heat until all the sugar has dissolved; add one coffee-cup full of lemon juice, which is the juice of about six lemons; pour into a jug and allow to cool; pour a bit into a cup and add water, fizzy or not, to taste]

The party seemed to work fairly well; it was a lovely night, so I set up my telescope and we admired the moon, and beckyc saw our visitor above while wandering indoors to pick up binoculars. After a little while, the hedgehog moved into the next-door garden, where she engaged in an uneasy, though hard to photograph, stand-off with the district cat.

Comments

[tea-cantata.livejournal.com]

Hedgehog-nose! Eeeeeeee!

[tau-iota-mu-c.livejournal.com]

That's a funny looking squirrel.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Do you have the utterly unreasonable luck of having urban echidnas, in your part or in any part of Australia, or are they creatures of the northern jungle?

I was immensely impressed by the echidnas in Taronga Zoo, I wanted to put a breeding pair into my suitcase and enliven the fauna of Thetford Forest thereby. England could probably do with wombats, too.

[tau-iota-mu-c.livejournal.com]

Never encountered them in the city, but since I live approximately here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Coonabarabran_location_map_in_New_South_Wales.PNG
I have seen them one more time than once. The first time was in that dot to the north of the red line, working at the Narrabri array. After sunset, on a day when I had seen a kookaburra attack a snake, and about 20 kangaroos just milling about (normal events really, at that site), there was an echnidna just wandering about. I got a rather fuzzy shot that I can't find right now.

And the other time was last week when swapping the car with the next telescope operator -- she lives about 15 km out of Coona -- and I encountered an echidna on the road which I had to swerve around. When we came back, it was still in the same place. That's when I spotted the smouldering upturned tanker that hit it. Or maybe not.

I was just talking about wombats today. A friend of mine in Melbourne was hit 3 (three) times by a wombat on the yarra trail last week, as he was MTBing along. Hit the wombat, stopped, wombat hit him, then wombat hit him again and knocked him over. Tacoed his wheel. It turns out wombats can supposedly run 40km/h for short periods (found this out from a German observer who gave a colloquium today, then backed up by the highly reliable pikiwedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wombat ) This be also true: http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Wombat

Do you want some possums? I hear Enb Zedders really love them.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Not keen on possums; the biggest thing we routinely find up trees in England is a squirrel, so I was disturbed to find cat-sized arboreal creatures ambling around in a noisy noctural fashion when walking across the University of Sydney campus at midnight in the winter.

From the described powerful-but-slow-to-anger don't-pester-me temperament of the wombat, I wonder if the Australian mythos includes people dwelling alone in the deep countryside, distrustful of visitors, and identifying with wombats -- or do they have too much an overtone of stupidity to make sense as an object of emulation? The ones at Taronga were asleep the one time I was there, and looked like smooth furry rocks, I was disappointed.