Life List

I was inside a huge cage watching cages of animals.

Feeling so excited.

I photographed owls and I talked about owls. They were my lifers.

But the owls were bored.

I was only one of the many thousands passersby who came and went. Do they keep a "life list" too?

They closed their eyes, as if to say, "Wait until you are a rat, I shall then have interest in you."

"Mushroom Go"

To his embarrassment, the mushroom master could not capture a single mushroom during his trip to Australia, even in a zoo.

Oh I thought there must be an abundance of mushrooms in a zoo, just like kangaroos (at least they are alike by having two o in them). 

Have kangaroos eaten all of them, and the later formed a colourful world of white, black, brown, orange, red, yellow and green mushrooms inside these kangaroos' stomach?

Though no inside view, here is the non-extraordinary look of a kangaroo.

And of course, a koala too, who is paid to sleep and rest. That is a non-easy job.

Life is good at ten degrees Celsius

"Stop worrying about the world ending today. It's already tomorrow in Australia."  -- Charles M. Schulz

But that is not why we went to Perth last week.

Life is too busy, no room for worry.

Life is very relaxed, yet these birds showed no anxious moments too.

A shag reciprocated by clapping its wings while a smiling foreigner was approaching. 

A gull exhibited ladylike qualities, as ladylike as Audrey Hepburn, and withheld all its noisy scavenger manners.

Life is so good at ten degrees Celsius.

Tailor Birds In Action

This tailor bird nest had to be supported by a paper bag when my wife had mistakenly trimmed off a grapevine at which this nest was built.

The parent birds seemed to have accepted the damage caused and remedy provided; three eggs turned into an equal number of healthy babies finally.

So happy I brought a chair to take some pictures in order to recognise our great effort. The chicks always thought it was their parent wanting to feed them, though that was not my intention, while the real ones were piercing me with their highest pitch, the G10.

Both parties were then busy at making a living in the weekdays.

When weekend returned, the babies were gone.

I should have dressed them up in the first place. A red Super S and a yellow lightning bolt, which one should the bird prefer?

These are my birds I shall shout when these symbols appear.

Beauty is in the eye of a Paranoid

Routine can  blind us, and the day will be filled to the brim with pretty colours when looking from another side- the opposite side of a tree stump this time.

It is not another new perspective offered by little humble mushrooms, just then only a paranoid is capable of intercepting the correct frequency.

The paranoid was once mistaken as a botanist that he would always like to pretend to be. He is a peculiar hiker who never travel without a DSLR. His bows and kneels are a mode of embracing nature up-close.

Mushrooms are weirdly powerful, they  have hypnotized this hiker from the very first day.

"Tick, Tock, Tick, Tock..."  The pendulum is going back and forth.