#western grey kangaroos

[sitting-on-me-bum]

“Itchy Roo” by Lea Scaddan

Location of shot: Perth, Australia

“Down to the right a bit. Yes that’s it. Ooh that’s better!”. The young Western Grey kangaroos were having a play and it looked like one was scratching the other to relieve an itch.

Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards

[snototter]

A young western grey kangaroo (Macropus fuliginosus) in Mungo National Park, New South Wales, Australia

by Robyn Waayers

[inbarfink]

[rabbitcruiser]

Zoo Basel (Zolli) openend to public on July 3, 1874.

[begottaum]

Photo of Western Grey Kangaroo, Mat Laughton

[southernimages]

Khaiserstuhl CP, Wildlife in Wine Country

Dear Reader: The predatory bird circles high in the morning sky then swoops down low to within a hundred metres of me. A Wedge-tailed Eagle, Australia’s largest bird of prey. Wedge-tailed Eagle hunting I am heading for the Kaiserstuhl Conservation Park, a twenty minute drive from Nuriootpa in the Barossa Valley and around 90 kms from Adelaide. Kaiser Stuhl was a popular winery, now incorporated…

[haveyouseenthisanimal-irl]

[mutant-distraction]

Matt Laughton

Western grey kangaroo

[destinypaw]

Here's my latest OC character I've been working on for over a month now after seeing the cancelled movie larrikins which I never seen it. His name was Anthony.

Here's her biography:

Name: Anthony

Nicknames: Roo, son, Kid, Mate, big Roo, morsel, Ant,

Voice actor: tom holland (Same as Walter Beckett from spies in disguise and Ian lightfoot from Onward)

Family: Brian (father)

Tammy (mother)

Hank (older brother)

Charllie (younger sister)

Love Interest: Red (boyfriend)

Home: Outback australia Gumtree forest (home)

Eye colour: Golden yellow

Fur colour: Brown

Alignment: Good

Personality: Kind, helpful, submissive, curious, Nervous, nice, brave, sneaky, caring, sensitive,

Species: Western grey kangaroo

Likes: Red (Boyfriend) Berries Travelling the whole outback His friends

Dislikes: Danger, Rudeness being called Roo (formerly) Losing red or his family and friends. Hotspur’s Plans Red’s stubbornness Being taken care of (formerly)

Friends: red (boyfriend) Perry (friend) Andrew (Friend) Perry’s family

Enemies: hotspur And Dorset (enemies) Doris Rabbits dingoes

[furmity]

Another stunning example of the strange painted quality of my phone camera, but the sundews are flowering! (Drosera whittakeri)

Went to the dam and saw that the turtles are waking up. Even saw two eastern longnecks (bioregionally native) among the Macquarie river turtles (in these parts, abandoned pets). In summer this dam's surface is covered with them.

A koala in the tree that always has a koala in it, and another down the track. Small mob of western grey kangaroos.

A limping Australian raven around the car, alone but they flew well and were finding things to eat. Breathtakingly glossy- purple in the sun.

Kaurna Yerta.

[mihaelalimberea]

A kangaroo joey tenderly grooms her mother ❤️. I photographed this cute pair at the wildlife sanctuary created by Ecopia Retreat on Kangaroo Island.

The kangaroos in the photo are Kangaroo Island kangaroos, a subspecies of the Western Grey Kangaroo (Macropus fuliginosus). Because of their long period of isolation from mainland Australia, the KI kangaroos are pretty different from the Western Grey kangaroos. They're shorter, darker, and much cuter if you ask me!

📸 Canon R5 & Canon RF100-500mm F4.5-7.1 L IS USM

📍Kangaroo Island, South Australia

[sitting-on-me-bum]

“Air Guitar Roo”..

Animal: Western Grey Kangaroo. Location of shot: Perth, Australia

“I was driving past a mob of Western Grey Kangaroos feeding in an open field that was filled with attractive yellow flowers. I had my camera with me, so I stopped to grab a few photos. I suddenly noticed this individual adopt a humorous pose—to me, it looks like he's practicing strumming on his Air Guitar.”

by Jason Moore (Australia)

2023 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards

[not-poignant]

Hey Pia! Hope you're well (very new reader here).

I gather that you live in quite a rural area (?) what do you like about living there? What is the flora/fauna like? I'm from the UK and haven't really experienced other climates so I'm interested heh

˶‘ ᵕ ‘˶

Hi hi anon!

I'm in what's classified as 'semi-rural' here in Western Australia, but basically it means that I am smack in the middle of dense suburbia, and then 10 minutes away from farmland and bushland on all sides, lol.

It's weird! Because it means we have a lot of amenities close by (though no hospitals or emergency care, they're all around 30-60 minutes away), but it also means when we travel out of the suburb, we often see kangaroos or alternatively alpacas and sheep (there's a lot of fleece farms up this way).

The weather here is actually quite Mediterranean (literally, Perth is classed as a 'Hot-summer Mediterranean climate' in the Koppen system). We can go months without rain. And we get around 139 clear days per year (no cloud cover), which means we're one of the sunniest capital cities in the world (to my endless dismay).

As to the animals *thinks* it's fairly normal to see kangaroos around here, at large parks and on farmland and clearings in bushland, and sometimes on the side of busy roads (which is not great). They are most common at dawn and at dusk. We also used to see wild emus for a while, but that was a few years ago, and I think this area is now too built up for it!

There are lots of parrots, and they're probably the most common birds we see, outside of like doves, Australian magpies (they are not Corvids), Australian ravens (they are Corvids), and birds of prey. The most common parrots we get up here are Carnaby's cockatoos, rainbow lorikeets, corellas, and pink & grey galahs. We also have a decent population of wood ducks, lol. And a lot of small songbirds. We get a lot of singing honeyeaters and brown honeyeaters in our garden.

Most of our trees aren't deciduous, so they keep their leaves all year round. And Eucalyptus are flowering trees. Right now all the jarrah trees are flowering all at the same time, with puffy huge white and cream blossoms, turning the bushland into the sound of lazy buzzing. Every day this week will be over 36C, so we make sure our birdbath is full, and the birds do actually use it. We have a garden, and I have mostly native plants in there, as well as some pots with curry plant (karapincha) and lemongrass, as well as rosemary, thyme and lavender.

When the weather is hot and there's clouds in the sky, we get the most amazing sunsets. My userpic is of a sunset that happened in my back garden.

These, for example, were all taken in the back garden:

And this is what most of the surrounding bushland around us looks like in summer:

And some extras:

[faithfromanewperspective]

red desert arrangement brainstorm i guess

Heal and replace. Heal and replace. It doesn’t take too long to heal and replace; the demons we’re running from, they’re begging to stay. How do you capture that musically, when I’ve already got the parts all going on, the four-part harmony, the chords and the percussionbass rhythm going on underneath? What do I do when it sounds almost exactly like the first verse? The demons we’re running from, they’re begging to stay. I think I see the problem.

Pop music is notoriously repetitive; orchestral music is not. When you don’t have lyrics that change between lines and verses, when you have 40 or 50 people playing instruments who don’t want to play the exact same thing, on a 4-bar repeat that changes up a couple times depending on the section of the song, you’ve gotta get creative. And can I just say, of all the songs I’ve played covers for or even attempted, I chose this album because from a musical standpoint it’s not boring. It’s no cookie cutter I V vi IV or whatever chord combination with a simple drum beat and repeated melodies. The bridges, at least, of each song, are something else. They were clearly written to be fun to play, rather than easy. I wouldn’t recommend them to a beginner busker. Few people I know will cover 5 seconds of summer, for good reason too. It’s difficult. The chords are unpredictable, for example red desert, focusing on vocal harmonies and using simple melodies to bring them out, has a sneaky E major chord in a B minor piece, G sharps littered around the place that aren’t in the key signature, aren’t always there. It means you’ve gotta look twice before improvising, figure out what bar you’re in, what notes to play. E is the subdominant in a B minor piece, in making it major instead of minor, it’s harder to tell that the piece is in a minor key. It shakes things up a bit. It should make it easier to fill in with something interesting, a countermelody over the verse: should I give it to the flutes maybe, or should I switch some of the parts that people played in the first verse around? I can figure that out later.

In the meantime, note that the other commonly occurring chords in the song are B minor and A minor. This is clever: B melodic minor scale ascending adds a G sharp; and A minor has a G sharp in both its harmonic and ascending melodic versions. As a result, the song works smoothly and feels calming and resolved.

So imagine the creatures in the desert. You’ve got the hot wind blowing red sand over cacti and scraggly brown shrubs, the occasional bunch of desert trees, eucalyptus or acacia or mulga I’m not sure, I haven’t brushed up on my ecology quite that much. For the purpose of this exercise, it doesn’t matter. Imagine a bird flitting above the desert. A little spiky lizard or maybe a spinifex mouse flitting around. Can I write all of their parts, weaving in and out of the melody, so each instrument doesn’t get bored? Can I write the migratory birds that fly overhead in search of water, seeing the same landscape every year, never landing on it? how about the red kangaroo, and the western grey? Is there a brown snake sneaking around the bushes: ominous, how about a minor chord for it. I’ll fit it in the transition from A minor to E major, because the harmonic tone-and-a-half jump between F natural and G sharp, both accidentals in this piece (meaning F is meant to be a sharp and G a natural) gives just the sound I’m after. No one wants to be bitten by a brown snake when you’re miles away from the nearest road, let alone hospital. But the red desert is here to heal our blues. We’re safe. Snakes are scarier than they sound: they don’t actually want to bite you. Their venom is meant for the little prey they can actually swallow—they can’t eat a human. They’re not likely to bite unless they think you’re going to hurt them first.

In the recording, the bugle sounds I gave to the bassoons and brass in the first verse could be these animals peeking out. I can see a scorpion when I listen to it. They’re great for looking at from a middle distance, gorgeous, angry, spiky things. But the spiky grasses and desert leaves you can pluck and take apart for your liking. They’re not overgrazed: ecologically there is no problem with that. Some of them you can even eat, bush tucker, you should try it sometime. Connect with the land. Red, red desert, heal our blues.

These plants are the ‘ooh’s in the second verse in the recording. Lovely and ominous. Yet despite being first in the album, red desert is the last of eleven songs in my arrangement. It’s an album theme: every song has ‘ooh’s in the second verse. Well, at least three of them. I think they can be edited a little to wrap around our desert creatures. And our muse! Who is our muse? I’ll dive deeper for you. Who did we call to leave all their fears at the end of the world with us? Let’s make the little melodies dance around them, using the notes that we discussed. You’re the only one I do this for.

So now I have it. Ideas. Concepts, theories, imaginings, that I can build out of notes that somehow go with what I’ve already done. Do the same with the chorus. I don’t know when I’ll get to it all. But here is the framework. I hope we all learned something today. Had ideas. I know I did. I know this orchestral part is going to be better for it. One day. When I make the ideas a reality.

[rabbitcruiser]

The Zoo Basel (Zolli) openend to public on July 3, 1874.    

[southernimages]

Monarto's Wildlife Roads

Dear Reader: David notices a pair of brightly coloured Mulga Ringneck parrots landing in a tree by the roadside. I pull the car over and power down the window to allow both of us to capture some images. Mallee Ringneck On this initial foray into the bushland around Frahns Farm, in the Monarto area, we are exploring the roads surrounding a fenced off region which is being revegetated. We have…