Pajareo sin fronteras

After visiting  Jerrabomberra Wetlands , the next place I was hoping to visit in Canberra (for nature things at least) was the  National Botanic Gardens , another one of the best-known places for wildlife in the ACT. It was only a short walk from the ANU campus where we were staying, but our visits kept getting delayed for various reasons- at least in part because the sun sets annoyingly early in Australia during the wintertime, and it kept getting dark before we had time to visit.  Finally, we ended up managing our time properly and getting there, though it was with only 40 minutes until the sunset, not nearly enough time for a full tour of the gardens. Nonetheless, it was just enough to see some of the iconic Australian birds I hadn't seen yet, starting with the beautiful female Satin Bowerbird we saw hopping on the ground next to the path. Hard to get more Australian than a bowerbird after all, and these ones were lovely and approachable, though they were also goo...

It was with a mixture of happiness, trepidation, and excitement that I learned last year that Nikki received an award from the Australian government to take a master's degree at Australian National University. Happiness because it's a very selective and prestigious scholarship, trepidation because of the suddenly very long distance that we were going to have to deal with, and excitement because it meant that I was going to get the chance to visit her in Australia at some point. In June of this year, I finally got that chance, as I happened on a very good promo price from Cebu Pacific that coincided with her winter vacation.  Since Nikki hadn't had much time to travel around Australia, and I wasn't sure when I'd be back in the country, we decided to spend part of our time doing a road trip from Brisbane down to Sydney so that we could spend some time on the coast and get out of Canberra. It wasn't necessarily a birding trip per se , since my objective was mo...