I’ve worked in a few different places over the last 2 and a bit weeks. Long hours and staggered lunch breaks meant eating in odd places: an industrial estate, on the side of a main road, in a waiting room, sitting on the carpet in the corner of the room.

After working under fluoro lights and staring at a computer for hours I just wanted to sit quietly and look at some nature. Easier said than done. Wilting pot plants, glimpses of sky (when it wasn’t raining) and kerbside weeds were all I had at my disposal.

I did find a small table under a tree that was main road adjacent, so not particularly peaceful. There were ants on the table - yellow crazy ants, as it turned out. How depressing.

One place I did work was a breath of fresh air (literally, as there was no air con). It had dim lighting with strobing ceiling fans, cold concrete floors, drafts, echoes and a rat BUT it also had a nearby outdoor eating area. There was shade and trees and bushes around the edges. And birds!

Ibises, butcher birds, crows and noisy miners wandering around looking for dropped crumbs or bugs. They weren’t doing anything out of the ordinary, but just being surrounded by birds and trees while I ate my lunch was enough to clear my head. Being briefly in nature was enough to get me through the rest of the shift.

I already knew about the benefits of spending time in nature (I’m always banging on about it) but it was interesting to find myself becoming nature deficient for the first time in many years. Clearly something I dreaded happening a few weeks earlier.

So I’m back to my usual routines now and routinely panicking that I don’t have enough online content. Grateful that I get to wander off to look at bugs multiple times a day though.

I’ve been a little quiet online lately. A holiday roadtrip over Easter took me offline for a while (I resisted the urge to post anything and just enjoy being on holidays) and the chaos of returning to reality and getting back into the usual routines has kept me occupied.

I’ll post more about my adventures later, I’m sure, but after visiting so many wonderful places, the familiar sounds of Brisbane are very… jarring. Everything is loud. Lorikeets are loud. Planes are loud. Tree mulchers are loud. Cars on the main road are loud. Cars purposely made to be loud are LOUDER and seemingly more frequent.

There were plenty of holiday sounds that were just as loud - screeching flocks of hundreds of cockatoos and corellas, road trains passing, the low roar of tires on the road that vibrated through the car. These sounds were a bit of a novelty, I guess.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been away from the Brisbane sounds for a few weeks that I notice them more. Perhaps they’ll work their way back into my subconscious and I won’t be bothered by them as much in a month or so?

I felt a lull in the noise of Brisbane this morning as I stood in the front yard. There were no screeching lorikeets (they usually kick off around 1pm) and the traffic had yet to pick up on the roads. There were no sirens or barking dogs. My front yard is mostly protected from the noises, a combination of facing the right direction and well placed trees and fences.

The morning sun warmed my back while I looked at my garden. It warmed me now, but I knew in 5 minutes it would heat me enough to be uncomfortable, sweaty and slightly pink.

I have a busy few weeks ahead with lots of deadlines and limited downtime. I’m not thrilled at the thought of it all. So this brief moment in my garden felt like me taking one last gasp of fresh air. Which I also did literally.

The scent of honey filled my nostrils. I couldn’t place where it was coming from exactly. The beehive, surely, but the scent was everywhere. I knew the leptospermum/tea tree often packed an amazing smell when in full bloom, but it has barely any flowers on it at present. Perhaps it was the hundreds (thousands?) of tiny alyssum flowers that had grown over the stepping stones while I was away? Or was there something else in bloom, hidden away behind the bushes?

I didn’t have time to hang around and find out, only enough time for a photo, not even a few minutes for a quick sketch. Definitely not enough time to pull another handful of weeds.

I won’t have time to write posts about them, but I’m hoping to find a few more moments to stop and inhale in the coming weeks.

I’ve posted previously about the wasps flying past while I typed on my computer on the back deck, but I realised that this all started a year ago when I was hunting through an old cupboard downstairs, desperately looking for some newspaper to line the guinea pig cage.

No one reads the newspaper any more1 so my supply of cage lining Courier Mails was drying up. I knew there were a few pages lying somewhere, crispy and brown with age, not used because they were too small and thin or stapled together.

I found them wedged behind an empty chook food bag. Victorious I pulled them out and proceeded to flatten them into the corflute cage tray only to have bits of mud explode out at me.

Some sort of mud wasp had built a nest in the rolls of newspaper. Although it took me a while to work this out, given there were no wasps, only dozens of dead spiders. Dead spiders encased in a Spiderman comic strip, no less. Very amusing, Ms Wasp, very amusing.

The more I moved the paper, the more dried mud and dead spiders I uncovered. It was a horror show.

I eventually spotted a larva wiggling amongst it all and put the clues together in my head. I googled to confirm my suspicions: Wasp leaves dead spiders sealed in a tomb with her egg so the larva has some tasty snacks upon hatching.

Gross.

And also cool. I called my kids to come and see and explained what it was.

Sadly I had ruined the entire nest, which I was a bit sad about, but I was keen to find out more about the bees and wasps that were nesting around my house. I upped my game gathering bamboo offcuts and drilling holes in pieces of old timber.

A year later and I have wasps and bees everywhere. Far too many to keep tabs on.

Not as many spiders for some reason.

One of the things I wanted to have as a resource was videos of nothing. Videos that can play on a classroom projector or as a meditation. Videos in which nothing is happening in particular, but if you watch them for long enough you see a leaf fall or an ant walk past.

Today I’m watching my livestream of gum blossoms while I type.

https://youtube.com/live/GvZs392PciU

There’s tiny native bees coming and going. A stamen caught in a spider’s silk that is spinning in the breeze. The sun coming out from behind the clouds and casting bold shadows across the leaves.

I feel a little silly watching this unfold on my computer screen, as the real thing is only a few meters from me, but it’s hot in the sun and I find myself having to squint against the glare. Also my eyeballs don’t have the impressive optical zoom that my camcorder does, so I wouldn’t see half the insects or the individual stamens/sparkles.

While I do spend a ridiculous amount of time admiring my flowering gum in person, it is much more accessible through a livestream. And this is where I realised the value of having a resource like this.

Accessibility.

A friend of mine was recently confined to a hospital room with no windows for far too many weeks with nothing to stare at but the ceiling. Even a few minutes of staring at some gum blossoms would have broken up her day and lifted her mood.

It’s proven that even a few minutes of exposure to nature has huge benefits1 but sometimes getting to the nature isn’t easy. I’m always telling my children to go outside, however we are lucky enough to have a backyard.

I’ve been keeping a list on my phone of all the reasons I’ve come across that stop people being able to access nature. Here are some:

• staying in hospital

• rainy day, can’t play outside at lunchtime

• Shift worker, sleeping during the day

• Unable to make it to nature journalling class

• Limited mobility, unable to walk far across uneven ground

• Brisbane’s humidity is awful 24/7 during summer

• Fear of bugs (this one cracked me up - he was fascinated by insects, but didn’t want to go near them)

• Covid/Flu/confined to bed

• Being held hostage by small humans

And that’s not including a raft of debilitating mental health issues that prevent one from simply stepping outside.

The benefits of having a livestream can transfer across to other areas, of course. Being able to see a snapshot of a particular time of year, a flower that isn’t currently blooming, seeing a species or location that you may not have encountered before, a “live” specimen to draw from, rather than using a static picture.

And that’s how I convinced myself that livestream resources were worth my time. It’s taken me a while I get to this point, testing cables and capture cards and software updates and errors and false starts and extension cables… and then the wifi drops out.

The only thing I haven’t got is audio because my directional microphone was so powerful it was picking up the sound of the neighbours stirring sugar into a cup of tea.

And in any case, neighbourhood noises are not relaxing. Cars driving over a manhole cover sounds more like a nail gun through a microphone. Every dog bark and noisy miner chirp was grating at my brain. I don’t live in a flight path, luckily, but why are there so many planes all of a sudden?

So mute it is.

I hope you find time to stare at nothing for a few minutes today.

I’m sure I’ve seen at least a partial lunar eclipse in the past. I honestly can’t recall. Most of the interesting things happening in the night sky in recent years have required staying up past midnight, or rolling out of bed at 4am and that’s not happening.

So I was particularly excited that a lunar eclipse was happening before my children went to bed and we could observe it from our front driveway. Not only that the weather was perfect! Barely a cloud in the sky, a light breeze after a hot day. It was so lovely standing in the partial darkness staring up at the moon as it disappeared and glowed red.

I ended up filming most of the moon’s journey through the sky and watching it back on my computer. It was fascinating to see how the light and dark parts of the moon’s surface disappeared into the darkness then slowly became red. The shadows and highlights and reflections all played together to make a wonderful jumble of colours.

It hadn’t occurred to me that I could journal the lunar eclipse but I did a few days later. I found the black paper I bought ages ago and milk bottle cap made the perfect stencil. It wasn’t until I was halfway through colouring that I realised I’d picked up my watercolour pencils instead of drawing pencils. I had wondered why they were sharpening to a point as well they used to.

Still, I enjoyed trying to recreate the eclipse on paper, even if the black paper was too thin to take much water. My badly coloured and watered moon didn’t look too different from my pixelly camcorder image in the end.

I’m also glad I didn’t try to draw it while the eclipse was underway, it was nice just to stand and stare for once.

Even as I type:

There’s an assassin bug nymph strolling across the top of my computer. I’ve stopped 4 times to see what its doing (cleaning its feet, if you’re interested).

At the heart of the problem is the fact that our house is very open. There are no insect screens and we live mostly on the back deck, a wall of trees and bushland views blocking out the neighbours and traffic and with this comes the endless birds that fly past (and through) our living space. If they’re not hopping through the trees they’re checking for crumbs we’ve dropped or resting on the railings.

Over the weekend a baby kookaburra took a wrong turn and got stuck in our kitchen. It was plonked back outside, unlike the juvenile bush turkey that accidentally ran through the open laundry door last week (it refused all helpful directions, pooped everywhere and flew into the wall while trying to escape).

While the birds are distracting, I’m aware of their presence and their daily routines, so they’re part of the scenery. It’s the insects that are really distracting me. Being peak summer they’re everywhere. Spiders in the bathroom. Cicadas landing in our dinner. Wasps terrifying my children. Yesterday I stood up while writing an email on the back deck and a peacock bee almost flew into my head.

I am absolutely not doing anything to stop myself getting distracted by insects either. I filled a box with bamboo off-cuts and paper straws last year and within a few weeks there was a resident. I check it several times a day. Recently I found three little wasps living in it or at least looking at it.

As I desperately try to finish this post the wasps are cruising in and out beside me. I turn to see if it goes into a new hole, or back into an existing one.

Honestly, I’d probably get more work done in a small room with no windows. But where’s the fun in that?

I set up my camera to watch the raindrops gathering on my dwarf banana.

I love the pattern that the raindrops sit in, lined up like threaded beads along the veins on the leaf. How many tiny raindrops must it take to swell into one of the giant silvery domes balancing precariously? While my video didn’t show the quicksilver drops sliding down the leaf like I had expected, it was the almost imperceptible droplets hitting the surface of the leaf and scattering at different angles that caught my attention in the end.

Listening back to the audio was interesting. The sound of the rain drumming on the neighbourhood tin roofs is almost overwhelming at times especially combined with bursts of wind (feel free to mute it!) but as the rain subsided other noises returned. Cars on the street, planes high above, sirens on the main road (I edited these out as best I could. No one needs to hear sirens when you’re trying to relax).

The birds were what I noticed the most. As soon as the rain eased off a chorus of calls came through my headphones. The crows and noisy miners, rainbow lorikeets flying past, butcherbirds singing. I even thought I heard a peewee/magpie lark at one point. These birds all live around me but I don’t usually hear them all at once. Clearly they enjoyed the rain too.

I’m hoping my dwarf banana also enjoyed the extra nutrients that rainwater brings. Maybe it will actually grow bananas this year.

Here’s the video:

Bottlebrush flower spikes look completely different to the “classic” flower diagram so I found this diagram from the Australian National Botanic Gardens really helpful.

Here’s a few of the elements that I noticed…

Filming from this angle that I noticed the open petals formed a classic 5-petal flower shape. I hadn’t noticed them before as they’re usually obscured by all the flashy colour of the filaments.

If it was only the petals on the stem I wondered if it would look like one of those rolling pins with the shapes carved on it. I never had a chance to check the bush before everything fell off, sadly.

The filaments curled up inside the flowers intrigued me. They always seem so straight when in bloom but they’re tightly curled inside.

They straighten out like a firework eventually.

I couldn’t work out if the fruit capsules followed a growth pattern along the stems but more than likely they do. They look like dainty wooden beads, well-worn at the edges.

The older capsules are even more swollen and worn, almost like sun-bleached drift wood. Some don’t look like they have even opened and I wonder why?

The last element I’ll mention is this little sawfly larvae - a wasp larvae nibbling away on a leaf. All by itself.

The sawflies on my dwarf flowering gum work in teams of over a dozen, demolishing whole branches in almost a day. I wonder if this sawfly larvae are a different species to the gum tree ones? Does the wasp lay her eggs singly on a bottlebrush as opposed to a clump of eggs on a gum leaf? Or do the larvae hatch and disperse around the plant, given how small the leaves are?

What elements did you notice on the pink bottlebrush? Was there something that jumped out at you? Leave a comment, I’d love to hear from you!

Turns out my friend had a brother with an abundance of stick insects and before long I had purchased an enclosure and was bringing home a box full of spiny leaf insects.

I have 13 in total and my life now revolves around spraying them with a water bottle and searching for fresh leaves. I have yet to sit down and draw them.

It was only after I accidentally backed into a second smaller web that I noticed the teeniest dewdrop spider I’d ever seen. It was no bigger than a grain of raw sugar. I had no idea what dewdrop spiders were until a few years ago and haven’t seen many since. They live in the webs of orb weaver spiders, pinching the smaller morsels of food for as long as they can get away with it.

I turned back to the massive spider web and saw one straight away. Silvery abdomen glinting in the sunlight.

I noticed a second, and a third. The more I looked, the more I saw. Some frozen in interesting poses, others scrabbling around and getting comfortable. All up I counted about 10 of varying sizes.

I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed so many of them right in front of me but I’d clearly been blinded by the size of the orb weaver. They were scattered through the web like little twinkling Christmas ornaments. The golden threads of the web catching the sun and shining alongside them. A Christmas web!

Of course my photography skills and equipment did not extend to capturing this special sight (getting everything in focus, making the spiders not disappear into the background and highlighting all the silver and gold sparkles) so I sat down this afternoon and drew it.

I usually tell people that nature journalling is better than taking a photo because you have to transfer all the details onto a page (which in turn imprints them on your brain) however in this case it really was the only way to truly capture the scene.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

So maybe instead of sitting in the car and trying to start it over and over (stay with me here, the analogy is almost there), I should get on a bike instead1. I’ll be wobbly at first but I’ll get better as I go along and at least I’ll be moving instead of still trying to get started.

I was staring into my backyard thinking about all this earlier today when a massive, wonky butterfly flopped slowly past me. I gasped out loud actually because it was so close. It disappeared over the roof but circled back around and came to land on my favourite tree, staying there for about 10 minutes while it recharged under the overcast skies.

I called the kids to come look at him (for it was a him, thank you butterfly poster) and we saw he had quite a damaged wing. A whole chunk missing - maybe that’s why he was flying wonky. He wasn’t perfect but he was doing fine.

I don’t need to have perfect videos, or perfectly curated social feeds, or have perfected botanical drawing because that’s the whole point of why I started Hooray for Nature. To enjoy nature through creativity and learn about it as you go.

So while I’m encouraging others to do that I need to remember it applies to me too.2

Of course I completely forgot to take a photo of my stall or many of the fantastic observational drawings that my stall visitors did. At one stage I managed to sneak off to look at the lizards and turned around to find a sugar glider right beside me. *swoon*

It was so lovely to see the community turn up to learn about the wonderful bushcare work that is happening at Wendon Way. I’m keen to see more of Wendon Way and how they’ve transformed the area over the past 12 months as I didn’t get a chance to pop down to their actual bushcare site.

I had a table inside the auditorium with a range of nature items on display for visitors to draw. I was almost never without a drawing buddy as children and adults stopped by to draw feathers, seedpods, shells and leaves.

I brought along a few branches from my garden, which apparently included a few spiders, leaf hoppers and beetles (bonus nature!) but they were quickly taken to the garden outside (I know not everyone likes bugs).

The day went so fast in the end I barely had time to sketch the rescue bats at the stall next to me, or the giant lace monitor from Geckoes Wildlife that came past on his handler’s shoulder. Oh well.

It was lovely to meet so many eco-conscious folks yesterday and if that’s how you’ve found your way onto my fledgling website, then HELLO and I hope we see each other again soon!