Birds

It seems that time doesn't like me updating this blog. It's taken until now to get around to an entry I wanted to write three days ago. Monday night I took the mountain bike up to some single track on the sandhills at The Spit. That ride always has it's interesting moments with the way tyres tend to slide away when they hit a sand patch. I have to say that my skill at riding in sand is slowly improving -- it may have even saved my life after hitting a bump in the road at 62km/h last year.

On this particular occasion, the track was slightly more treacherous due to some storm damage that had gone through at some time in the recent past. Trying to avoid big holes while sliding through sand is always an interesting experience. Once I'd negotiated that, I was surprised to encounter some native wildlife up there. There seemed to be a colony of birds (I'm not sure which exact species they were) making the area their home. What was really surprising was that when I encountered them on the track, most of them seemed disinterested in flying away and were often content to run alongside me.

Obviously it took some trust on their part to do that, and I have no idea what I have done to earn that trust, but it happened several times during the course of the ride. It's quite staggering to think that something like this could happen in what is very close to the geographical centre of the Gold Coast (a city of 500,000 these days). Combine that with the restless sea breeze and the sound of the waves crashing in the back ground, and I could have been a million miles away.

It wasn't such a memorable night for the three canetoads that found their way under my wheels (although I really should have been in double-figures). I don't generally slow down for canetoads. Go and look up "canetoad" on wikipedia and you'll understand the rationale behind my thinking.