Sensible beer drinking and fancy birds

Mmm.tasty!

Sydney is the brash busy archetypal Aussie city - we have steered clear of it following our one visit several years ago. But there is perhaps a good reason to return - this being to visit the home of the award winning Modus Operandi brewery in the Northern Beaches area. We managed to find a 4-pack of Modus Sonic Prayer IPA in a bottle store at Jindabyne - fabulous stuff! And one of the local Canberra breweries, Capital Brewing, were also represented with their quaffable Trail Pale. In Canberra itself we were within walking distance of the renowned Bentspoke Brewery Tap where we found a huge range of beer most of it brewed on site - we could have stayed there a week! We have noticed that many of the newer breweries are producing lower alcohol ales - Modus have a 3.2% pale ale called Easy and Balter, a very fine brewer from the Gold Coast south of Brisbane make a 2.8% beer called Captain Sensible.

Ooh just look at me!

I was quite taken with the sight of this chap sitting in a tree by a pond not far from the centre of Brisbane. This is a Straw-Necked Ibis in his finest mating plumage. Most of the year he's a bit dowdy and scruffy but in spring he puffs up his chest and comes alive to impress the ladies. There are over a thousand parks and playgrounds in the greater Brisbane area and they're full of cycling paths, sports fields, playground apparatus of various types and wildlife. In many of the parks remnants of bushland have been preserved and are maintained with native plantings and reintroductions.

What a show off!

I spotted the ibis pictured above in the Keith Boden Wetlands which is basically a big pond in the park with plenty of tree cover and a good sized island in the middle. (No idea who Keith Boden is - I did Google him with no results in connection with Brisbane.)  Among the other birdlife taking advantage of this suburban oasis were ducks, cormorants and different types of egret. I took this photo of a Cattle Egret sitting in the same tree - this bird is white all year round apart from, wait for it, breeding time when the male's head and chest turn a lovely shade of orange. These birds certainly know how to turn on the charm when the time is right.