Brett and Karen's 2017 End of Year Letter
Hi All,
At the end of last year's letter we mentioned what might be in store for us in 2017, including possible trips to Hawaii, the US mainland, Britain and Christmas Island. Well, one out of four isn't too bad, is it?
Please read on ... or at least enjoy clicking on some of the pictures! (Click the thumbnails below to view larger images - then click the larger image to make it small again).
Bowra Wildlife Sanctuary (Dec / Jan)
For the second year in a row, Karen and I spent the Xmas / New Year period caretaking the Australian Wildlife Conservancy property called Bowra - just northwest of Cunnamulla in central southern Queensland. This 14,000 hectare property was formerly a cattle station, but is now a hotspot for inland Australia's threatened birdlife. It is closed to the public from November to April, with caretakers like us maintaining a presence, doing maintenance jobs around the homestead and recording birds seen every day.
The temperature on most days reached 40 degrees or more - which we are quite comfortable with - but most nights cooled down to below 30! The birds were great (as usual), the accommodation is excellent and the couple of weeks of isolation (apart from satellite TV, internet and mobile phone coverage) was refreshing.
The photos below show me and Karen birding at a couple of different waterholes, a family of emus cooling off under the camping area sprinklers, and shots of various rooms in the homestead - our bedroom, the kitchen and the "ballroom".
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Pittwater Kayaking - February
We returned to Sydney to finish the kayaking trip we had interrupted in 2016 due to bad weather. The northern beaches area is a great place to visit - but we wouldn't want to live there! The photos below show scenes from some of our paddles and walks.
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Snowy Mountains - March
In early March we spent a week in the Snowy Mountains as guests of a friend who is a member of a lodge at Perisher Valley. We have done a lot of walking in the Snowies, but managed to find a couple of destinations where we had not been before, including the Sentinel and the shores of Club Lake.
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Warrumbungles - April
We spent a week in the Warrumbungles as part of a Shoalhaven Bushwalker trip away. The walks and scenery were excellent, the weather was great apart from a storm that hit us when we were on top of Mt Exmouth, and we visited the Siding Springs observatory while Brian Cox and Julia Zemiro were recording one of the two episodes of "Stargazing Live" - see photo below. Julia waved to us!
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Dryandra Woodland - mid June
The Dryandra Woodland is a nature conservation area in Western Australia about 164 kilometres south-east of Perth. It is a complex of 17 distinct blocks managed by the Western Australian Department of Parks and Wildlife and spread over approximately 50 kilometres (30 mi) separated by areas of agricultural land. The area is considered to be one of the state's major conservation areas, and although it is far from pristine due to its history of logging operations, a number of species of threatened fauna are rebuilding populations through the removal of introduced predators such as foxes and feral cats. You can thank Wikipedia for this paragraph.
Karen and I flew to Perth as part of another trip, but broke our journey to spend a few days in the Dryandra Woodland with Karen's brother Peter, partner Helen and daughter Tahlia - who live a couple of hundred kilometres south of the woodland in Albany. The photos below show Karen talking to the local magpies, some of the flora in the woodland, Karen with our hire car, our extended family, and an echidna.
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Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands - late June
After our Dryandra Woodland stay, Karen and I returned to Perth and headed to Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands for ten days. We have wanted to visit the islands for years, partly because our life bird list numbers had stalled in the 590s, and Christmas and Cocos were guaranteed to present us with about a dozen bird species we had never seen before to take our numbers into the 600s. They did not disappoint!
As you can see from the Google Earth image below, the islands are way out in the Indian Ocean and not too far from Indonesia. Christmas Island is about 2,600 kilometres north-west of Perth, with the Cocos group about 975 kilometres to the west. Temperatures are tropical but kept pretty constant by the surrounding ocean. A quarter of Christmas Island is mined for its phosphate soils, with most of the rest of the island incorporated into a national park that is still under threat from mining expansion.
Christmas Island is famous for crabs - deservedly as they were everywhere - and also for its detention centre, which is now largely unoccupied except for criminals awaiting deportation. The Cocos Islands are more tourist oriented, with many atolls surrounding a central lagoon about the size of Jervis Bay.
We saw great birds (see photos below), many of whom were nesting, and had a really enjoyable ten days. Flights and accommodation are expensive - but what the heck! The only down-side of the trip was Karen passing out on the plane on the final leg from Perth back to Sydney. The Virgin cabin crew were excellent - as soon as they saw Karen passed out in the aisle with me trying to get her into the recovery position, they quickly arrived with oxygen, paged the plane for a doctor (nobody volunteered) and were on the verge of diverting to Melbourne (as it was the nearest major airport at the time) before I explained to them that Karen was a serial offender, had often passed out on planes, and that she would be relatively okay soon.
We were the last to leave the plane in Sydney, with me pushing Karen in a wheelchair through the terminal. Karen stayed awake after her initial "rest", but was pretty crook, and she threw up a lot during the plane, train and bus trips back to Bomaderry. Future flights are a concern, and Karen is undergoing a series of tests trying to find a cause ...
The first nine photos below show where the islands are, and shots of our accommodation, scenery, birds, crabs, defence and mine tour. The last three photos show two birds on the West Island of Cocos (where we stayed) plus the view from the balcony of our cabin - right next to the airport runway!
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The Red Centre trip - most of July
A week or so after getting back from Christmas Island Karen and I were off again, this time driving to Alice Springs to meet up with a couple of friends - Gill and John - who had flown to Darwin to walk the Jatbula Trail (a five day full-pack walk from Katherine Gorge to Edith Falls) before bussing south to meet us. Gill and John were researching a book on walking in the red centre.
We hired a big 4WD for the Eastern McDonnell Ranges, but all four of us squeezed into our X-Trail for the Western McDonells, Palm Valley, Rainbow Valley, Kata Djuta (the Olgas), Gosse Bluff, Kings Canyon and Uluru (Ayers Rock).
The picture with the lights in it (below) was taken when we visited the "Field of Light" - a visually spectacular art installation with Uluru as its backdrop. The artwork is composed of 15 tonnes of solar-powered LED lights - about 50,000 of them! I didn't take the picture - I stole it from the ABC website - as my photos did not do the artwork justice.
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The Grampians - end of October
We spent a week in Victoria in late October / early November, visiting the Grampians as part of a Shoalhaven Bushwalker trip, and continuing on to Mt Eccles - a volcanic area a bit further south.
The photos below show a Turquoise Parrot at Glenrowan, three Grampians scenes, a trig on Mt Rouse (one of the 400 odd volcanoes in western Victoria - who knew?) and two old farts who look remarkably like Karen and Brett.
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Glenbrook - late November
Karen led a 4 night camp at Glenbrook in the Blue Mountains for the Shoalhaven Bushwalkers in late November. As you can see in the photos below, we saw great scenery, had many swims, saw cicadas breaking out of their shells, photographed nesting birds, almost trod on a Death Adder, - and bagged a trig!
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Narooma - December
In mid December Karen again led a car-camping trip for the Shoalhaven Bushwalkers.
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Sport and Fitness
Last year I finished the year with a golf handicap blown out to 11 after playing off a single-figure handicap since turning 60. I had hoped to be playing off 18 by now, but some hot form in the last two months of this year - including my best golf game ever (a 72 at the St Georges Basin Country Club - only two over par) - saw me finish the year with a single figure handicap yet again - down to 8.3 - which is not bad for a 64 year old!
Karen is still doing her weekly mountain bike ride with the local Bicycle Users Group, and she manages at least one other ride a week, usually on the weekend. Karen still swims a couple of times a week too, but in Winter joined the Wobbegongs - a group of demented swimmers who hold races in Jervis Bay during the coldest part of the year and then stop their racing when the weather starts warming up in Spring! Karen was the Women's 55-60 Age Champion of the club this year - but she was the only person in her age group ...
After completing 67,161 push-ups and 67,161 sit-ups last year - see the 2016 letter for an explanation of these numbers - my shoulders were absolutely rooted and it took me about three months to recover and get back to a pain-free existence. Being pain-free felt so good I didn't do any exercise for most of this year - apart from chin-ups. At the start of the year I could only do 3 chin-ups, but got this up to 7 by November when I strained something in my back and neck and shoulder, and welcomed pain back into my life. Nearly Xmas, and it still isn't quite right. Drugs help me get through golf ...
Photography
I am still the Vice-President and Webmaster of the Bay and Basin Camera Club (BBCC), and am still taking "snaps" on the various activities that I do rather than producing works of "art". The logo dispute with the Inner West Photographic Society (IWPS) - see last year's letter - ended up with them saying that although they had not copied the BBCC logo, they would agree to change their logo - as long as I took down our "defamatory" web pages about the situation. I have removed the "offending" pages, and the IWPS has until the end of January to change their logo. I am kind of hoping they forget - so I can continue the fight!
Birds and Birdlife Shoalhaven
As mentioned earlier, Karen and I have now seen over 600 Australian bird species. We are on the committee of the BirdLife Shoalhaven branch of BirdLife Australia, and the branch is going really well, harassing local government about inappropriate development that impacts bird conservation, and educating the public about birds via talks and lectures, newsletters, our website Facebook and Twitter.
Our biggest news of 2017 !!!
In 2005 Karen and I walked 400 kilometres of the Bibbulmun Track in Western Australia, taking many photos of wildflowers along the way. In early 2006 Karen started a cross-stitch project based on those wildflower photos. For the past 11 years Karen has been working on the project when she gets a spare moment (which admittedly is not very often) - and this year Karen finally finished.
The professionally mounted and framed artwork now takes pride-of-place in a prominent position in our living room - see the photo below ... sorry about the reflections!
Plans for 2018
Apart from a month-long trip to New Zealand early in 2018 to do three different cycle tours and two great walks (Abel Tasman and Keppler), Karen and I don't have any definite plans for next year, apart from continuing to use as little plastic as possible (Karen) and becoming a militant atheist (me).
As always, we hope everyone has a great Xmas and New Year, and that 2018 is wonderful for you too ...
Cheers,
Brett and Karen Davis
P.S. As usual, our previous yearly letters can be viewed by clicking the following links - 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016.