Tawny Frogmouth skull

I found a tawny frogmouth carcass, so, well, to cut a long story short, after a few months and a few experiments, here's the result:

They are an absolutely incredible and beautiful bird. I'm particularly stunned by how much space in the skull is taken up by the eyes, I figured they'd be big, but they literally take up more volume then the rest of the head! I'm very pleased with the result. It doesn't look extremely clean, but the final step was to soak it in peroxide, so I'm confident it's fairly sterile. 

Even though their beak does have a bit of a point to it, they are not raptorial. Which means they don't hunt on the wing, or catch prey with their talons, rather they eat things like slugs, moths and small lizards more by foraging then hunting. 

Here is a photo I managed to take of one near my house a little while ago, it was an opportunity snap with my phone so it's not the best quality.

If it needs to be said, the bird I found was already expired and I would never intentionally harm wildlife, unless it was about to eat a person, and then only if I didn't think they were a dick.

Leaf bug

Found this cute little leaf bug, was only about 10mm long.

 

EDIT 08/07/2011 I've worked it out, it is in fact a planthopper, specifically Acanalonia conica. It is in a separate order then Katydids. Leafhoppers are Hemiptera which are known as "True Bugs", where as katydids are Orthoptera which includes grasshoppers, locusts and crickets.

Golfball hailstorm in Melbourne 06/03/2010

We were driving home when the storm hit, we pulled up under a tree for a while and got battered by some ice cube sized hail. We then decided to drive a little further to the cover of a petrol station and this was the hail that came down. 

It was so loud pelting the windows and panels, and that was just the smaller stuff, I don't doubt if we'd got caught out in the big hail it would have done some damage. 

bee close up

fun with USB microscope

I borrowed a USB microscope which can magnify up to 200x. So, as I'm sure just about everyone would do, i went and found a few dead insects and took pictures of them. the first pic is a scale photo to give you an idea just how small the subject was. If I take any more particularly good pics I might post them. I did run the bottom photo once through photoshop's sharpen filter, nicely takes a bit of the fuzz off.

macro shot with my canon IXUS
80x

200x