Qoality Time

A couple of statistics from Phillip Island:

Number of people who attended Brother Konchog’s Mongolia presentation Saturday afternoon: 3

Number of people who attended the Penguin Parade that evening: 1000+

Number of Little Penguins that scrambled out of the sea to their sand dune nesting burrows, much to the rapt thrill the 1000+ gathered to witness it, including myself: also about 1000

Note to self: In the future, do not schedule a slide show on an obscure subject at a resort island venue on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Instead, schedule it for evening at the shore, don a penguin suit, and deliver it from a platform in the frothy sea. Maybe with lasers and a techno soundtrack.

I actually quite enjoyed giving my talk for the few who cared, but I really enjoyed the living heck out of the Phillip Island Penguin Parade. Not just because I got to easily tick perhaps the only penguin I’ll include on my birding life list, but because it was genuinely marvelous. After a whole day of feeding at sea, these littlest of penguins start to approach the shore in rafts ranging from just a few to maybe 20. They’re terribly shy, worried about late-cruising birds of prey, the 2000 human eyeballs gawping at them, and their terrible adaptation to land-waddling. But after calling each other ‘chicken’ and a little jostling from the back, they make their mad 20-yard dash to the relative safety of the dune tussocks.

After a spectator gets his or her fill of this, there’s a leisurely stroll back along the boardwalk to the visitor’s center, next to which – like, just a couple feet away in some cases – are weary mommy and daddy penguins obligingly barfing up dinner for ravenous and impossibly cute little fuzzballs. I couldn’t possibly give this experience a higher recommendation, but unfortunately, as you might imagine, photography is strictly verboten so I can't show you what I saw.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t have awesome photos to share with you. I had a free morning and arranged to get dropped off early for a bit of forest birding. Just as my ride was pulling away I peered up the first tree at flitting birdies, but quickly forgot about them. Can you see what was up this eucalypt?

No? Dig:

I scored six lifers, but after seeing my first free-roaming (free-loafing?) koala, those were really just icing (along with many madly bounding forest wallabies).

Off to Alice Springs this morning where it promises to be beastly hot all week, and a group studying Shantideva’s Way of the Bodhisattva are expecting me to answer questions Tuesday night such as: “Could [Konchog] discuss how our mind is a beginningless formless continuum and what is the support for a consciousness outside of a body?” Um, ha ha...what?

More soon from Australia’s Red Center.

Comments

[Christian]

When I was around six years old, I loved to ask embarrassing questions to adults, such as "Why is the sky blue?" To which my grandfather wisely always answered: "Because."

[Tom Robertson]

Note Konchog:

*Anything* is made better by penguins, lasers and techno.

[kunzang]

Ah! The heat of Alice Springs. What a delight!! I mean it, I love it! Enjoy your sojourn, especially Uluru. Nothing compares...I will be an invisible member of the welcoming party, however will be absent from the heady discussions on the formless continuum etc. I will be outside, drinking in the endless sky!