Around where we live it’s easy to find Australian brushturkeys. Here’s a photo I took of one a while back:
They’re big birds, and have become more and more common in this area over the years. They scrape for food in leaf litter, and this time of year they build large mounds of litter and mulch to incubate their eggs, using the warmth of the decaying mulch rather than sitting on the eggs. So they move around a lot of leaf litter. And this year in particular I’ve been noticing that a lot of the footpaths we walk on around the neighbourhood are constantly being covered in a layer of leaf litter, sometimes so thick that you almost have to wade through it. While the adjacent garden beds are scraped clear of mulch and have large patches of bare soil.
There’s been a bit of this in previous years but this year it’s particularly bad. I’m guessing a lot of residents are constantly scraping or sweeping mulch back into the gardens and off the footpaths, or maybe their are council workers going around and doing it. I’m starting to wonder how much of this the gardens can take before the birds become real pests and start having an adverse effect on plants. Being native birds they’re a protected species, so there’s nothing anyone can do about them, legally.
In other news today, I received my Kickstarter copy of Dungeon Crawl Classics #100: The Music of the Spheres is Chaos. This is a wacky dungeon adventure with some cool bonus stuff because it’s the 100th adventure in Goodman Games’s series. Should be fun!
And tonight was another project tutorial session at the university for the image processing course. For dinner beforehand I tried a new burger and wings place. I had the chicken burger with peri-peri sauce, which came with a side of chips. It was pretty good! I’d go back here again some other time. Though not this semester since I’m still trying to eat somewhere different and new every week.
And after the project session with the students, the professor, who’s an old colleague from the previous jobs we did together at Canon, asked me if I wanted to fill in for him in teaching the next 18 months worth of his courses, as he has an offer to do some outsourced research work which will take up all his teaching time. This means I’d be organising the courses and giving the lectures for the courses – which involves some time commitment, but also extra income. And it’s a great opportunity to do some more university level teaching. So I’m very interested! I just need to see how many hours a week of work will be required, and fit that into my current Outschool schedule.
So this is pretty big news, and I’m a bit excited!
New content today:
Congratulations on the job offer!