So far...

This place is great! The weather has been beautiful, the city is beautiful (especially Fremantle – a suburb of Perth on the Indian Ocean), and the people are wonderful. On Saturday, I ran along the coastal path that goes from Mosman Park (the suburb where I currently reside) to Cottelsloe. The beaches are stunning here, and there seem to be beautiful, international people everywhere you go. Pat took me along to a faculty dinner and I tried kangaroo – it was delicious! It is a dark red, lean meat. It tasted to me like an excellent steak. Yesterday Pat, her husband Len, and Joe, a colleague from Oregon State University who just relocated to Perth for a post-doc position, were nice enough to take me out birding in Jarrah woodland south of the city. It is an ecosystem endemic to Western Australia, and is filled with plants (and birds!) from whole families and even orders I’ve never seen. Being in the most isolated city in the world, it doesn’t take long to get out of Perth and into some nice, continuous tracts of native habitat. The birding was fantastic. The flies were not so fantastic. We stopped for a quick break in a cute little town called Jarrahland, and then headed back to the coast and stopped at Woodsmen Point to look for shorebirds. For the birders who are reading this, here is my species list so far:

Little pied cormorant

Pied cormorant

Australian pelican

Straw-necked ibis

Sacred ibis

Wood (maned) duck

Pacific black duck

Brown goshawk

Ruddy duck

Nankeen kestrel

Eurasian coot

Black-bellied plover

Greater sand plover

Red-capped plover (Dotterel)

Red-necked stint

Great knot

Ruddy turnstone

Pied oystercatcher

Silver gull

Fairy tern

Laughing dove

Galah

Rainbow lorikeet

Laughing kookaburra

Welcome swallow

Richard’s pipit

Black-faced Cuckoo-shrike

White-winged triller

White-breasted Robin

Grey Shrike-thrush

Willy Wagtail

Splendid Fairy-wren (Wow!)

White-browed Scrubwren

Red Wattlebird

New Holland Honeyeater

White-cheeked Honeyeater

Western Spinebill

Striated Pardalote

House Sparrow

Magpie Lark

Woodswallow sp.

Australian Magpie

Australian Raven

Pictures to come soon. Love to all!