JerseyWendy
New member
- Jul 20, 2012
- 20,995
- 26
Happy Birthday dear Trish! :smile015:
*
I hope your day was filled with love, laughter, joy and happiness 
Happy Birthday Trish (Betrisher)
- Thread starter JerseyWendy
- Start date
Allee
Well-known member
Happy Birthday, Trish! I hope you have a great day. If you have a celebration dinner, maybe the beaks will allow you at least a small taste.
Selestine
New member
- Jun 18, 2013
- 572
- 0
- Parrots
- My beautiful SI Eclectus Zephyr and my handsome B&G macaw Vandal, daughter's Sun Conure Loki and son's GCC Blaze
Happy birthday! I'm betting you'll come away with an awesome story for us about how great your day was
Timothy
New member
- Aug 16, 2014
- 475
- 0
- Parrots
- Blue & Gold Macaw [Maya] // Sun Conure Baby [Zippo] // 2 Lovebirds [Nibblet & Nellie]
Happy Birdday - I mean Birthday, From me and the flock
faeryphoebe1
New member
Happy, happy birthday, Trish!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY SWEET TRISH!
I HOPE YOU HAVE A FABULOUS DAY AND THAT ALL YOUR WISHES COME TRUE!
[URL=http://www.sherv.net/]
[/URL][URL=http://www.sherv.net/]
[URL="[URL=http://www.sherv.net/][IMG]http://www.sherv.net/cm/emoticons/birthday/flowers-and-birthday-gifts.gif[/IMG][/URL]"][URL=http://www.sherv.net/]
[/URL][/URL][/URL]
I HOPE YOU HAVE A FABULOUS DAY AND THAT ALL YOUR WISHES COME TRUE!
[URL=http://www.sherv.net/]
[/URL][URL=http://www.sherv.net/]
[URL="[URL=http://www.sherv.net/][IMG]http://www.sherv.net/cm/emoticons/birthday/flowers-and-birthday-gifts.gif[/IMG][/URL]"][URL=http://www.sherv.net/][/URL][/URL][/URL]
- Jan 19, 2014
- 14,247
- 221
- Parrots
- Red Bellied Parrot /
Ruppell's Parrot /
Bronze Winged Pionus /
English Budgie
I hope you have a wonderful birthday Trish!!! I hope Dommie and The Beaks know they have to be EXTRA good today!
I hope Dommie and The Beaks know they have to be EXTRA good today!
Betrisher
Well-known member
- Jun 3, 2013
- 4,253
- 177
- Parrots
- Dominic: Galah(RIP: 1981-2018); The Lovies: Four Blue Masked Lovebirds; Barney and Madge (The Beaks): Alexandrines; Miss Rosetta Stone: Little Corella
Thanks so much for the birthday wishes, everyone!
I had the BEST day! The family gave me a whole pile of lovely new clothes and a bottle of Bailey's Irish Cream (hic!). We had Chinese for dinner and a disgustingly fattening chocolate cake with two candles: one for me and one for my daughter, Ellie, whose birthday it was on Tuesday.
The best part of my birthday was a picnic we had with friends in the past week. They were only available on Tuesday, so that's the day we went to Boarding House Dam.
BHD is probably my favourite place on earth. It takes about an hour and a half to get there, driving mostly over awful rutted, potholed dirt roads. While it's a National Park now, historically the place was built to house logging teams 'way back in the 1800s. A large boarding house used to be there and a cement dam is built across the creek that flows through the area. Hence, the name.
Well, we arrived at around 11am and Kim (hubby) took charge of unpacking the lunch stuff. The kids and I immediately went bush, looking for a certain place where we knew a Satin Bower Bird makes his love shack. There's a huge fallen tree about 100 feet long which has formed the border to a sort of track through the bush. If you lean carefully over the top of the trunk and crane your neck, you can see Mr Bower Bird's bower snugged right up next to the tree.
It's an ingenious place to put it, because you'd never know it was there and you'd never think to search for it so close to the track! I found it a few years ago when we were picnicking. I was trying to hoist myself up to sit on the fallen tree, but was unsuccessful. !!! Buggerit!!!
During my efforts, my binoculars fell over the tree and I had to lean over to fish for them. You can imagine my surprise when I spied a perfect SBB's bower, completely decked out with blue stuff! There were blue clothes pegs, the blue plastic lids off Bic pens (which I haven't seen for sale in years), blue drinking straws, bits of blue Dillwynia flowers and the blue flight feathers from Crimson Rosellas. If you look at a SBB in strong sunlight, you see a strong blue iridescence in the feathers of the male. I assume they use blue artefacts to enhance the bluity of their plumage and hence, wow the girls. Mr SBB dances and displays in and out of his bower and Mrs SBB will, ideally, come and allow herself to be seduced. Then, she goes off and builds a nest somewhere secret and raises her brood alone. Google 'Satin Bower Bird' to see how handsome these guys are. Sadly, Mr SBB was not at home when we arrived and his bower stood in disrepair. I supposed we were just too early in the season to see it at its best and so another visit would be a good idea in a week or two.
Anyway, another special aspect of BHD is the creek. Nearest to the picnic ground, the creek water is brown and still, filled up with tannin from millenia of fallen bark and leaves. I'll bet my bottom dollar there are platypuses living in it, but of course you'd be lucky to spot them as they don't show themselves to just anyone. It's exactly the right sort of place for platypuses, though, being deep and quiet with high banks and lots of cover. I've seen platypuses in the wild and they're so charming, romping and playing and splashing about with each other in the water. I hope to see some one day at BHD.
So yeah, it's a wide, slow-flowing creek, but there are two waterfalls: one close to the picnic ground and another farther down the track. At the bottom of each, there are perfectly circular pools carved out of the sandstone substrate. Each pool is big enough to hold about ten people frolicking about or fifteen sitting still in the cool mountain water. The rocky banks are high and covered in all sorts of lichens and mosses that catch the condensation in the moist air and then funnel water droplets back into the creek from their green tips. If you keep very quiet, you can hear the plip-plip-plip of continually dripping water. It's magic!
Well, you toddle along the creek for a ways and you come to a nice new wooden bridge. You cross that and walk up a mossy hill that's populated with enormous Flooded Gum and Coachwood trees. Now Coachwoods are one of my favourite trees. Their timber is very popular for furniture making because it's satiny and has a subtle dark stripe through its blonde/beige colour. The bark, though, is pale ivory. This makes a lovely contrast to the horizontal bands of dark lichens and mosses that grow up its length. The only comparison I can think of is the Birch tree of the northern hemisphere. I think, though, that our Coachwoods are rather more colourfully painted.
So next, you wander up through this lovely stand of tall, straight, daintily coloured tree trunks, all the while listening to the burbling from the waterfalls and the tinkle of Bellbirds in the deep forest. Everywhere is covered in mosses! I don't mean the little lumpy mounds you commonly get in damp places, I mean great hairy, furry masses that look like micro-forests of their own growing up the tree trunks or on the tops of rocks. There are so many different kinds that each tree or rock looks like its own special patchwork of varicoloured green moss. The lichens are either grey or dark brown and so the colour play is riotous. I find myself staring at the rock surfaces and often smile to think of another rambler coming along behind to find me transfixed by a big fat rock with hairy moss on top of it. I'm aware not everyone is as amazed by these things as I am. LOL!
Eventually, you reach a sort of plateau where the ground flattens out a bit and there's a clearing left by the demise of two huge fallen Flooded Gum trees. Just enough light gets in to allow orchids to survive there and so all the trees are thickly coated with some of our tiniest, most exquisite native orchids. There are minute Bulbophyllums and Sarchochilus plants jockeying for space on the branches and light from the sun. Their stems are fleshy but their leaves are kind of leathery with a waxy surface. That's to prevent them from succumbing to rot from the high moisture content of the place. Higher up, you get Dendrobiums which are a lot larger and more luxuriant, being completely out of the reach of orchid-stealers. At the tops of the trees, you can see the great dark clumps of Staghorn ferns and Birdsnest ferns, which can grow to be as big as a room! And all the while, the creek warbles away its secret song and the tiny bushland birds flick and flitter among the leaves in light that seems greened by its passage through the cover of the canopy.
I always spend a good while just sitting in the orchid clearing, listening and waiting and being thankful for places such as this. The stillness is so healing, you just don't want to leave it! But you do... you wander on down to a loop of the creek where a plank has been laid to help you across. If you're brave, you can slip and slither down to the water's edge across slick rocks and slippery leaf litter. I'm always brave, but one of these days I'll probably slide right into the creek for my trouble! LOL! There's a cave there and the water undercuts it (was probably the reason for its formation). If you wait for long enough, birds will come down to drink at the water's edge. I've seen Rosellas and King Parrots and Glossy Black Cockatoos there as well as smaller, more secretive birds like Golden Whistlers and Spinebills. The best was the time a little Rufous Fantail came and flirted with me from no more than three feet away! There was a shaft of sunlight that landed on a rock nearby and little Miss Fantail used it as her personal spotlight, flitting in circles and fanning out her lovely russet tail for me to admire. Now THAT was magic!
Well, by this point I had run out of puff, so the kids wandered on and left me by the creek. I stretched out on my rock and enjoyed a beautiful twenty minutes staring at the tiny patch of sky I could see through the high canopy. I couldn't help feeling as though my energy stores were being filled up by my contact with the Earth and I smiled to myself, thinking what a perfect place this is. Eventually, the kids returned and we made our way back to a picnic of ham sangers and oranges.
And that, my friends, was my idea of a perfect day! Hope to do it again soon!
I had the BEST day! The family gave me a whole pile of lovely new clothes and a bottle of Bailey's Irish Cream (hic!). We had Chinese for dinner and a disgustingly fattening chocolate cake with two candles: one for me and one for my daughter, Ellie, whose birthday it was on Tuesday.
The best part of my birthday was a picnic we had with friends in the past week. They were only available on Tuesday, so that's the day we went to Boarding House Dam.
BHD is probably my favourite place on earth. It takes about an hour and a half to get there, driving mostly over awful rutted, potholed dirt roads. While it's a National Park now, historically the place was built to house logging teams 'way back in the 1800s. A large boarding house used to be there and a cement dam is built across the creek that flows through the area. Hence, the name.
Well, we arrived at around 11am and Kim (hubby) took charge of unpacking the lunch stuff. The kids and I immediately went bush, looking for a certain place where we knew a Satin Bower Bird makes his love shack. There's a huge fallen tree about 100 feet long which has formed the border to a sort of track through the bush. If you lean carefully over the top of the trunk and crane your neck, you can see Mr Bower Bird's bower snugged right up next to the tree.
It's an ingenious place to put it, because you'd never know it was there and you'd never think to search for it so close to the track! I found it a few years ago when we were picnicking. I was trying to hoist myself up to sit on the fallen tree, but was unsuccessful. !!! Buggerit!!!
During my efforts, my binoculars fell over the tree and I had to lean over to fish for them. You can imagine my surprise when I spied a perfect SBB's bower, completely decked out with blue stuff! There were blue clothes pegs, the blue plastic lids off Bic pens (which I haven't seen for sale in years), blue drinking straws, bits of blue Dillwynia flowers and the blue flight feathers from Crimson Rosellas. If you look at a SBB in strong sunlight, you see a strong blue iridescence in the feathers of the male. I assume they use blue artefacts to enhance the bluity of their plumage and hence, wow the girls. Mr SBB dances and displays in and out of his bower and Mrs SBB will, ideally, come and allow herself to be seduced. Then, she goes off and builds a nest somewhere secret and raises her brood alone. Google 'Satin Bower Bird' to see how handsome these guys are. Sadly, Mr SBB was not at home when we arrived and his bower stood in disrepair. I supposed we were just too early in the season to see it at its best and so another visit would be a good idea in a week or two.
Anyway, another special aspect of BHD is the creek. Nearest to the picnic ground, the creek water is brown and still, filled up with tannin from millenia of fallen bark and leaves. I'll bet my bottom dollar there are platypuses living in it, but of course you'd be lucky to spot them as they don't show themselves to just anyone. It's exactly the right sort of place for platypuses, though, being deep and quiet with high banks and lots of cover. I've seen platypuses in the wild and they're so charming, romping and playing and splashing about with each other in the water. I hope to see some one day at BHD.
So yeah, it's a wide, slow-flowing creek, but there are two waterfalls: one close to the picnic ground and another farther down the track. At the bottom of each, there are perfectly circular pools carved out of the sandstone substrate. Each pool is big enough to hold about ten people frolicking about or fifteen sitting still in the cool mountain water. The rocky banks are high and covered in all sorts of lichens and mosses that catch the condensation in the moist air and then funnel water droplets back into the creek from their green tips. If you keep very quiet, you can hear the plip-plip-plip of continually dripping water. It's magic!
Well, you toddle along the creek for a ways and you come to a nice new wooden bridge. You cross that and walk up a mossy hill that's populated with enormous Flooded Gum and Coachwood trees. Now Coachwoods are one of my favourite trees. Their timber is very popular for furniture making because it's satiny and has a subtle dark stripe through its blonde/beige colour. The bark, though, is pale ivory. This makes a lovely contrast to the horizontal bands of dark lichens and mosses that grow up its length. The only comparison I can think of is the Birch tree of the northern hemisphere. I think, though, that our Coachwoods are rather more colourfully painted.
So next, you wander up through this lovely stand of tall, straight, daintily coloured tree trunks, all the while listening to the burbling from the waterfalls and the tinkle of Bellbirds in the deep forest. Everywhere is covered in mosses! I don't mean the little lumpy mounds you commonly get in damp places, I mean great hairy, furry masses that look like micro-forests of their own growing up the tree trunks or on the tops of rocks. There are so many different kinds that each tree or rock looks like its own special patchwork of varicoloured green moss. The lichens are either grey or dark brown and so the colour play is riotous. I find myself staring at the rock surfaces and often smile to think of another rambler coming along behind to find me transfixed by a big fat rock with hairy moss on top of it. I'm aware not everyone is as amazed by these things as I am. LOL!
Eventually, you reach a sort of plateau where the ground flattens out a bit and there's a clearing left by the demise of two huge fallen Flooded Gum trees. Just enough light gets in to allow orchids to survive there and so all the trees are thickly coated with some of our tiniest, most exquisite native orchids. There are minute Bulbophyllums and Sarchochilus plants jockeying for space on the branches and light from the sun. Their stems are fleshy but their leaves are kind of leathery with a waxy surface. That's to prevent them from succumbing to rot from the high moisture content of the place. Higher up, you get Dendrobiums which are a lot larger and more luxuriant, being completely out of the reach of orchid-stealers. At the tops of the trees, you can see the great dark clumps of Staghorn ferns and Birdsnest ferns, which can grow to be as big as a room! And all the while, the creek warbles away its secret song and the tiny bushland birds flick and flitter among the leaves in light that seems greened by its passage through the cover of the canopy.
I always spend a good while just sitting in the orchid clearing, listening and waiting and being thankful for places such as this. The stillness is so healing, you just don't want to leave it! But you do... you wander on down to a loop of the creek where a plank has been laid to help you across. If you're brave, you can slip and slither down to the water's edge across slick rocks and slippery leaf litter. I'm always brave, but one of these days I'll probably slide right into the creek for my trouble! LOL! There's a cave there and the water undercuts it (was probably the reason for its formation). If you wait for long enough, birds will come down to drink at the water's edge. I've seen Rosellas and King Parrots and Glossy Black Cockatoos there as well as smaller, more secretive birds like Golden Whistlers and Spinebills. The best was the time a little Rufous Fantail came and flirted with me from no more than three feet away! There was a shaft of sunlight that landed on a rock nearby and little Miss Fantail used it as her personal spotlight, flitting in circles and fanning out her lovely russet tail for me to admire. Now THAT was magic!
Well, by this point I had run out of puff, so the kids wandered on and left me by the creek. I stretched out on my rock and enjoyed a beautiful twenty minutes staring at the tiny patch of sky I could see through the high canopy. I couldn't help feeling as though my energy stores were being filled up by my contact with the Earth and I smiled to myself, thinking what a perfect place this is. Eventually, the kids returned and we made our way back to a picnic of ham sangers and oranges.
And that, my friends, was my idea of a perfect day! Hope to do it again soon!
Last edited:
- Jan 19, 2014
- 14,247
- 221
- Parrots
- Red Bellied Parrot /
Ruppell's Parrot /
Bronze Winged Pionus /
English Budgie
Wow what an absolutely perfectly beautiful day you had Trish!
As I read your picturesque descriptions, I imagined the most gorgeous, lovely, magical place... Where I'd love to be right now lol. I'd love to have seen a Bower bird's bower. It would be incredible to see it in person (not just on David Attenborough specials)! Also to see a Staghorn fern (love those) as big as a room wow!!
The day sounded wonderful both Tuesday and on your special day
As I read your picturesque descriptions, I imagined the most gorgeous, lovely, magical place... Where I'd love to be right now lol. I'd love to have seen a Bower bird's bower. It would be incredible to see it in person (not just on David Attenborough specials)! Also to see a Staghorn fern (love those) as big as a room wow!!
The day sounded wonderful both Tuesday and on your special day
MikeyTN
New member
- Feb 1, 2011
- 13,296
- 21
- Parrots
- "Willie"&"Lola"B&G Macaw,
"Dixie"LSC2, and "Nico" Scarlet Macaw.
Happy Birthday Trish!!!!
- Dec 18, 2013
- 22,301
- 4,216
- Parrots
- Maya (Female Solomon Island eclectus parrot), Jolly (Male Solomon Island eclectus parrot), Bixby (Male, red-sided eclectus. RIP), Suzie (Male cockatiel. RIP)
How on earth did I manage to miss your birthday yesterday, Trish?!? Sorry about that, my dear friend, but a HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY to you!!!!
You know what amazes me? It was your birthday, yet we were the ones blessed with the gift of your words. Thank you for sharing that most vivid picture of your perfect day!
You know what amazes me? It was your birthday, yet we were the ones blessed with the gift of your words. Thank you for sharing that most vivid picture of your perfect day!
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