You better promise me I'll be back in time

[barrington]

So I'm back from Mia Mia, which is where I went camping. There are some crappy photos, mostly crappy because I left my camera at home and we were taking them with mobile phones, so I'll probably not post them anywhere. Suffice to say it was relaxing and quite refreshing to get out of the city for a bit, though as seems to be the trend for my trips outdoors I managed not to be flayed alive by solar radiation until the last minute, in this case the final trip up the hill to the cars with the last load of equipment. How I managed that despite wearing sunscreen and a broad-brimmed hat I'll never know, but I guess my feeble sun tolerance will always find a way to strike me down. Even now I feel toasted, even on parts of my body that weren't exposed...and yet I'm only very slightly red. I guess it's good, otherwise I'd let my recent successful outdoors activities during daylight lull me into a false sense of invulnerability.

But enough of the curse of the ginger. I saw all the usual stuff you see in rural Australia, plus a few more grey kangaroos than I would have expected (one looked positively black), some goats (making trouble breaking through fences), and the happiest echidna I've ever seen. Oh, and some cows chewing on the bones of some dead sheep. Apparently they do it often, though usually its the bones of other cows; my minimal research suggests they do this not for Calcium, but for Phosphorus.

I also marvelled at the flora and the geology, of which I struggled to make sense. Lots of what looks like granite rocks strewn everywhere. The abundance of loose rocks in made more sense, at least in some areas, when I was told they used to mine Vermiculite there (I think that's right; it was certainly one of the things which, if it's low grade, they make into kitty litter). Despite enormous unexplained holes (I reckoned maybe a fox since it seemed too high up and too large for an echidna, the others felt maybe a wallaby) and mysterious late-night rock falls, I didn't see any bunyips or yowies either.

Comments

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

I'm legitimately curious: how do you tell if an echidna is happy, much less how happy? (I ask because I've spent years studying armadillos, and I figure that they'd show more signs of utter happiness than echidnas, but they don't give any clues. With armadillos, the only way you can tell they're happy is that they aren't squealing, but then armadillos squeak and squeal only when they're scared or angry, so that doesn't really tell us anything.)

[barrington.livejournal.com]

Er..I just deleted my description by accident. But rather than being curled up into a ball or "on patrol" (males like to march around the edges of their territory, from what I've observed), the one I saw was tucking into a feast in some anthills it had discovered in a horse's paddock, so I imagine it was qiute happy. The horse, for the record, was unperturbed.

[schmycom.livejournal.com]

But how do you know the horse was unperturbed? And the ants in the anthills?

I actually find your animal mood diagnoses fascinating! How can I say this without seeming sarcastic?