Bribie Island is just up the coast from Brisbane and it was about an hour’s drive this morning, going the opposite way from the in-bound commuter traffic. One of the joys of living in Queensland’s largest city is how quick and easy it is to get to beaches, forests, or mountains.
After being here more than two years, we’ve even begun to have favorite places that we know from previous visits. One of those is Buckley’s Hole Conservation Park, the “hole” being a lake only a hundred yards or so from Pumicestone Passage, the strip of sea water that separates Bribie from the mainland.
Since we’re having a cooler-than-normal spring (summer starts December 1 here and this area will be toasty by Christmas), we were glad of our windbreakers as we walked between the pond and the passage looking for birds and other wonders of nature. We saw quite a few, including wildflowers, lizards, trees, sand-anchoring vines, and feathered creatures of flight.
We didn’t identify any new birds, but we spotted some interesting “old friends” that we don’t see often. Two predators, for instance, were looking for breakfast, riding strong winds beneath fast-moving clouds. One was a white-headed, brown-bodied Brahminy Kite and the second was a White-Bellied Sea Eagle. Both were swift, graceful, and fun to watch.
We also saw a white Intermediate Egret with a long yellow bill, a couple of Pied Oystercatchers (Why the name? Oysters don’t have to be chased down and caught.), two black swans, pelicans, some coots with chicks, and a Dusky Moorhen sitting on a raised nest in open swamp near the pond’s edge.
You get to this semi-wild area by way of a residential street with houses on one side. Obviously lots of people live within a minute or two’s walk of nature’s displays in and around Buckley’s Hole.
I could feel envious of the folk who own those nice houses on the other side of the street, but I don’t for two reasons. One is that if everything we saw today was just outside our front door, it would become, I fear, just a part of the given, the known, the too-familiar. The other is the several kilometers of creep-and-crawl traffic we saw going into Brisbane as we were going out.
Living near a train stop and within an easy bike ride of where Kristi works is a great advantage. It’s okay that seeing a Sea Eagle soar on wild wind is an out-of-the-ordinary experience for us. For that we’ll endure, occasionally, an hour’s commute. — Bob
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