The Scruffy Astronomer

Some of the restrictions on Melburnians have now been relaxed. I hope we're not being too optimistic. But this morning, I found that we're allowed "outdoor photography". Close enough to birding, let's go! I was very twitchy, so I decided to go to Banyule Flats. This is the best birding in my area, mainly due to the variety of habitats found there. Banyule is on a floodplain of the Yarra, just below the confluence of the Plenty River. It has a relatively large lake, extensive reed beds (that provided a Painted Snipe a few years back), a chain of billabongs, riparian trees, open grassland and of course, the Yarra itself. It also has, famously, a couple of Powerful Owl roosts. I've seen lots of Powerful Owls before, but one more would always be good. So when I arrived I made a beeline for the spot (which I'll be vague about...). The long grass around the owl tree had been trampled in places, so I clearly wasn't the first birdo here. It always...

I had to do a bit of rearrangement in the showroom with an eye to social distancing.    These powertanks are now quite safe, and so are we.  

OK, here's a bit of fun for the lockdown. Recently, the Guardian newspaper ran a story on people who work from home . The specific angle was the embarrassing difference between what colleagues see - the camera's perspective - and what a visitor to the house might see. The article included pictures confessing both perspectives. I looked at this article and gazed abashed around my study. It seems that I'm one of those people too. My daughter and I run the local Joeys mob - Scouts under the age of 8. With Coronavirus having closed schools, Scouts Victoria has suspended face-to-face meetings in halls. As a result, we're using Zoom, a teleconferencing program, to carry on with our Joey meetings. We normally present the meeting from the spare bed and have the computer and its camera set up on a small table in front of us. That way we have a very sparse background with only an Australian flag. You can see the Zoom picture of me here. It's not the best quality picture, take...