Day #107 in lockdown Mumbai, India hotel…Birds over mammals?…

This adorable kookaburra posed for me in the yard in Trinity Beach, Australia, while sitting on the fence next to the rain gauge. These birds are much larger than they appear in this photo.

Note: To all of our readers visiting our site via a smartphone, please click the “View web version” tab under the word “Home” at the bottom of the page to access the web version enabling you to access all of our archives on the right side of the page. We’ll be updating our site shortly, making these extra steps unnecessary. Thank you. 

Today’s photos are from July 8, 2015, while in Trinity Beach, Queensland, Australia. See the link here for more details.


Yesterday’s post included a remembrance of our time spent in Kauai, Hawaii, in 2015 and a little about the story of our exciting experiences with the Laysan Albatross on the Garden Island, as shown here

After a while, they relocated to the roof, looking down for a possible morsel of food.  They are known to snatch food off of plates when cooking on the “barbie.” More on kookaburras will be coming in a few days with our wildlife posts.

As I pursued past posts for today’s photos, I stumbled across photos of the ever-so-fascinating bird, the kookaburra, while spending time in Trinity Beach, Australia, in 2015. 

Contrary to our usual distaste for zoos, although we appreciate their existence as an opportunity for humans to learn about animals, while in Trinity Beach, we visited a local zoo when we didn’t see many animals in the wild, except for kangaroos and wombats.

These common Yellow Allamanda were growing like crazy in the garden of our holiday home.

It was hard to resist when we were welcomed to “do a story” on the Cairns Tropical Zoo, avoiding an entry fee and providing us with a personal tour with one of the zoo biologists.

Having an opportunity to learn about the indigenous animals the zoo housed exclusively certainly opened our eyes to possible future sightings of the birds and mammals we learned about on that particular day.

Bottlebrush blooming in the yard.

Three birds particularly caught our attention; cockatoos, pelicans, and kookaburras, of which we’ve included a few shots today. As we continue sharing photos from past posts, we’ll include photos of more of the stunning creatures we were fortunate to see on that tour in a few days.

In 2017, we stayed in Fairlight, Australia, close to Sydney, and were thrilled to have the opportunity to interact with these special birds by hand-feeding visitors to the garden of our holiday home when they stopped by each day. Those photos will follow soon.

We drove up the mountain behind the market to Kuranda. When we began the steep and winding trek, it was sunny. When we arrived at the first overlook, it was cloudy, and rain had started to fall. We turned back with a plan to return to see the village at the top on a sunny day.

When we began our travels, we didn’t realize how significant birds would become in our constant search for wildlife. Not only in Africa and Australia, but we also had many memorable experiences with birds in many other locations, as many of our long-term readers have seen.

No, we aren’t expert bird watchers like our friends, Lynne and Mick from the UK with a home in Marloth Park, Louise in Kauai, Hawaii, and our friends Linda and Ken from the UK and South Africa. But we certainly are bird enthusiasts, spending time learning about those we particularly enjoy. 

We could imagine how beautiful this expansive view would be on a sunny day.

Often, I’ll post a photo of a bird we don’t recognize, and our friends will jump in and help us identify the specimen. Bird watching and savoring the beauty of birds can be quite a hobby and, at times, a lofty obsession, coupled with excellent camera skills. 

For us, we love seeing everything that walks, runs, flies swims, and slithers. If it’s moving, we are curious about it, including a wide array of insects we’ve spotted in our years of world travels. Some of our favorite experiences and photos include close-ups of insects and spiders.

The mountain and ocean view reminds us of Kauai, Hawaii.

Nothing new is on the horizon here at the moment. The hotel continues to be fully occupied. The monsoon season is in full force, with raging rain and floods almost daily. Covid-19 continues to infect more and more each day, and the prospects for leaving anytime soon diminish as the contamination escalates.

We’ve concluded that this is our life now and spend less time searching for travel options than we did in the past few months. We’ll know when we can leave and make decisions from there. All the speculation, expectation, and anticipation won’t change a thing. 

The sections of land always create such an exciting view both from the air and scenic overlooks at higher elevations.

The more we accept this as our fate, for now, the less stressful this scenario may be. It is entirely possible we could be here for a total of a year or even more. Laughter is our best panacea. Hope is our salvation.

Stay safe.

Photo from one year ago today, July 8, 2019:

A repeated photo of a few Gentoo penguins and me on Saunders Island, Antarctica, on January 26, 2018.  What an experience! For more photos from the year-ago post, please click here.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *