I popped back up to Brisbane for a little while to see the family for my birthday.

It was nice – we had a big party with a lot of relatives and a delicious cake.  And I stuck around for over a week afterwards, so I could see my friends and spend some time with my family.  We went to some exciting places – the first was a drive up to Mt Nebo, stopping at some lookouts along the way.  This was the first one:

One with the parents:

And the second lookout:

As you can see, it was a much more panoramic view.  We went to a small café that does amazing juices and got some lunch there.  Then we went home via the scenic route.  Dad often bikes along it, and pointed out some of the more interesting things, like a lamppost and telephone box in the middle of a horse paddock, and a house number written on a bathtub (people are wonderfully weird sometimes).

On another day, Mum took me to a plant nursery with lots of statues and some very exotic birds.  They were in little aviaries, so ignore the blurred lines in the photos – they’re the bars.

This is a Lady Amherst’s pheasant, with some pale zebra finches:

They were sharing an enclosure with a golden pheasant:

I took some video:

 

The tails of the pheasants are much longer than I ever suspected.  It looks like the train of some ridiculous gown.

A Mandarin duck:

And I took some video of that one, too:

 

This is an Indian ringneck parrot eating some corn:

 

Mum bought some plants, and I admired their fruit trees, and then we went home.

On one of my last days in Brisbane, Mum and I went to the Walkabout Creek Discovery Centre, to see their platypuses being fed.  They didn’t just have platypuses, though – this is one of the water dragons in the same tank as the platypus:

I just love its tail hanging down into the water.  And they were roommates with turtles, too:

Okay, I think I’ve built suspense long enough.  This is a photo of the platypus while he was swimming:

This little guy’s name is Barrun.  And as you can see, he often cruises along like a little crocodile, with just his nostrils, eyes, and a bit of his back above the surface.  I took lots of videos of this guy – this is him swimming:

 

As you can see, he’s missing patches of fur on his tail.  They’re still not entirely sure why this happens, but seasonal loss of tail fur is actually fairly common in male platypuses – the current hypothesis is that it’s linked to hormonal changes during the breeding season.

I also caught one of the turtles swimming:

 

It’s weirdly fascinating to watch.  Maybe because we rarely see it from this perspective – most bodies of water don’t have glass walls for us to look through.

The feed was several live freshwater crayfish, because platypuses have to be fed live food.  You might have seen the way he was running his bill along various surfaces in the first video, that’s because when platypuses swim they shut their eyes, ears and nostrils, and rely on their bill to find prey via detecting the tiny electromagnetic signals produced when muscles contract.

Now, after that info-dump, prepare for a lot of platypus videos.  Here, he’s got one of the crayfish, and the commentary is provided by Mum:

 

Another one with a crayfish, but now he’s doing a lot of rolling in this one, like he thinks he’s a crocodile:

 

The turtles got in on the crayfish buffet, too:

 

The platypus was what we were really here to see, but they had other animals as well.  Check out the lungfish:

These guys are basically living fossils, relics of the time when air-breathers were the new kids on the block.  See the way its front fin seems draped over that rock?  That’s because they tend to walk along the bottom rather than swim, like they have feet instead of fins.

There was also another turtle:

This is a spotted python:

And the classic carpet python:

They had quite a few of these.  Here are some of the others:

They get pretty big, as you can see.  The one in the last photo kept prodding along the top of the cage, particularly the mesh over the light up there.  I wonder if it was hungry and trying get to the heat source to see if it was something to eat.

This is a Boyd’s forest dragon:

A red-bellied black snake:

I took a video, just so you guys could see its tongue flicker:

 

There’s something strangely hypnotic about the way snakes move.

There was a large enclosure with some big turtles:

And some little freshwater crocodiles:

I got a video of this one swimming away:

 

Mum spotted this one peering from behind some rocks:

Then it was on to the outdoor enclosures!  They had some red-legged pademelons:

That name is pronounced the way you think it is, by the way; ‘paddy-melon’.  It sounds like some kind of exotic fruit.  I took a video of one of them eating:

 

And hopping around like a little wind-up toy:

 

I think it’s because I’m used to seeing kangaroos, which are a lot bigger, so the tiny pademelons hopping around don’t quite look real.

They also had a wombat:

I took a video of it playing in the dirt:

 

They had a large outdoor enclosure with kangaroos and wallabies.  This one in particular caught my eye, with the bright white stripes on its face:

It’s a Whiptail Wallaby, and I also got some video of it:

 

It looks ridiculous at first, scratching itself with its little hands, and then suddenly becomes quite graceful when it jumps away.

But the fun wasn’t over yet!  Mum and I went for a short walk around the Enoggera Dam – this is Mum starting off down the path:

The dam:

We were basically walking through wetland, with lots of reedy grasses:

I recorded some birdsong, just because:

 

We also spotted this bird, but I have no idea what it is and can’t seem to find out.  Maybe a female or juvenile of something?

 

We found this skinny tree wrapped in lianas:

And plenty of lantana, which is bad because it’s a weed:

Even if it does have nice flowers:

There were mushrooms along the path as well, and they were very brightly-coloured:

They look like something out of an illustrated storybook.  Then we stumbled across a mystery:

This is a rakali, a native water-rat, and as you can see it’s dead, but we couldn’t figure out how it had died.  There were no injuries, and it isn’t emaciated or with thin fur like you would expect if it was sick or old.  In fact, I crouched down next to it to see if it was breathing, in case it was just ‘playing dead’.  In the end, Mum and I decided it must have eaten some poison or something.

We found this crazy liana, twisted like an elephant’s trunk:

Mum is there to give it scale.

At this point, we were climbing above the path we’d taken a few minutes ago – you can just glimpses of the dirt path through the trees:

It was a steep drop, as you can see.  We also spotted a yellow robin:

They’re very good models, those birds – they stand very still in a number of attractive poses.  On the way back, we spotted a grebe, and I got both a photo and some video of it:

 

That’s it for Brisbane!  Well, that wasn’t it – I visited friends as well, but mainly consisted or restaurants, drinks, and sojourns to the city, so there aren’t exactly photos of it.