22 October, 2009

French Island

I'm going to back-date this post to when I should have posted it. And I'm going to make it short since I seem to be running out of time for everything at the moment. I made my first trip outside Melbourne city last weekend --- to French Island, 70km south east of Melbourne. To get there, N. and I took the train to Stony Point ($3 for a weekend ticket!) and then the ferry over to the island. About two thirds of French Island is national park. The rest is farmland. The main feature of the island is its booming population of koalas who are doing so well that the population has to be managed by taking koalas from the island to areas on the mainland where the populations are not doing so well. The second feature of the island are the 90 or so people who live there. They seem to be mostly mad to one degree or another. Our tick-list of wildlife we saw, apart from koalas, included echidnas, pelicans, lizards, and a large copperhead snake. Oh, and from the train to Stony Point we saw bogans and gangs of youths on scooters (the sort you push with your foot).











More photos in the Picasa gallery.

09-10 French Island

3 comments:

  1. Hmm, the Echidna looks very much like a Kiwi bird... That would challenge Darwin's theory! :D

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  2. It's more that the Echidnas challenge my photography --- that was the best photo I got. They are very shy and as soon as they see something they hide their face and start digging a hole.

    Apart from the colour, they are sufficiently different from a Kiwi to keep Darwin satisfied: no wings, four legs, snout, no beak, marsupial, and spikes not feathers. Maybe I can get a better photo one day.

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  3. OK, from your photo, it does not look like a kiwi. But if you look at the Wikipedia picture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Long-beakedEchidna.jpg...

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