Moving out of the Shell

The removalists arrive tomorrow, so I'll be moving out of the Snail Shell this evening. They said I could stay another day but I don't really like the idea of camping in my own (soon to be former) home.

From now on, internet connection will be intermittent. (I'm not sure how that will differ from the past few days, when cable has been failing more frequently than did my old dial-up.)

I have a full diary for next week, then I'm heading north on Saturday.

At a bookshop and on a radio near you ...

It's on the shelves!

I'm doing some radio over the next week, which will be fun. Here's the schedule. (I hope I haven't miscalculated the time differences.)

29 May, 12:40 pm: 5RPH Adelaide
31 May, 11.45 am: 2UE Sydney
2 June, 10 pm: 5RPH Adelaide
3 June, 2.40 pm: ABC Darwin
4 June, 8.00 am: ABC Perth
4 June, 11:30 am: ABC Radio National, Bush Telegraph
4 June, 1.40 pm: ABC Brisbane
4 June, 2.30 pm: ABC Northern Tasmania

Nature red in tooth and jaw

Python takes on goanna at a Western Australian mine site and wins.

Blogger avoids outdated 'nom nom nom' meme.

Steak out

My attempts to have a cup of coffee at my favourite cafe were thwarted by a TV crew, so I had a cuppa in my second favourite, which is located (conveniently) across the road.

I took photos, every one of which failed to include the actors.

The scene they were filming involved two cops leaving a fast food joint, where they'd bought lunch, and walking back to their car. They were wearing body armour. Not sure why. Possibly because they were concerned that the person behind the counter might have run them through with a kebab skewer.

Queensland update

Looks like I might have secured my cottage in the rainforest. I'm trying not to count my chickens before they've hatched but I can hear them cheeping and cracks are appearing on the eggs.

Stingers

Alex Wild at Myrmecos has an impressive list of things that have stung him. Literally stung, that is. I don't see any hidden bank charges or interest rate increases on the inventory. He's been clobbered by ants, bees, wasps, moths and plants. The life of a myrmecologist clearly has its dangers.

Malacologists have an easier time of it. At least, this malacologist does. For a start, land snails don't gather together in highly-organised colonies and swarm over intruders. Or maybe they do but it takes so long to get to the intruder that no one has noticed this behaviour. I dunno.

(I once let a freshwater snail, Lymnaea stagnalis, feed on my finger tip to see what the rasping radula felt like. I can report that it's similar to a cat's tongue at first. No problem while the dead skin is still in place. But once that's scraped off and the teeth hit living pay dirt beneath, it's not so much fun. And by that, I mean it's like a burn. But I digress.)

Because I haven't voluntarily thrown myself into the paths of swarming ants (or snails), my catalogue of stings is rather meagre. Oh, I've had plenty of encounters with honey bees and European wasp and stinging nettles, but not much that's worth recording. So let me engage in a diversionary tactic and tell you about a couple of invertebrate – me interactions rather than listing them. I'd be grateful if you could read the stories to yourself in a David Attenborough-type voice. It will help. Trust me.

• Borneo. My colleagues scrabbled their way up a near-vertical slope in the rainforest to look for snails, while I stayed behind to check out the nice flat bit. I forgot that I wasn't on familiar territory. (I don't know how you can forget that. Perhaps I'd gone troppo.) So when I broke open a slab of rotten wood, I wasn't expecting to get stung. I didn't see the culprit. It could have been anything, but was most likely an ant. The pain persisted for an hour or so, relieved only when I raised my arm above my head in much the same pose as those statues of Lenin hailing a taxi. The pain had faded by the time my colleagues returned with their collection of snails. I was going to play up the sting but it occurred to me that I had been Very Silly in breaking open the log with bare hands so I mentioned it in passing, just in case I had a delayed reaction. Yes, it's not the most exciting story but it was in a wild part of the world, so that must count for something.

• The next sting occurred in a not so wild part of the world — a bathroom in holiday accommodation on the Great Ocean Road, southern Victoria. And I saw the culprit this time: a scorpion that had been sitting happily among the folds of the bath towel. The poor little arachnid hadn't taken kindly to being used to dry off a human, so it defended itself by stinging me on the shoulder. Perfectly reasonable response. I couldn't get annoyed at it. The verdict: mild but persistent local reaction, some nausea and pain similar to a bee sting. And a good dollop of sympathy because, this time, it wasn't my fault

So there you have it. That's my big two. Now, if we were talking bites or snail slime-induced falling injuries, we'd have a book in the making. But I'm not prepared to mess too much with a Myrmecos meme. Stings it remains.

Note: Response to animal and plant stings is an area where Your Mileage May Vary. Anyone who has experienced a severe reaction or has seen it happen to someone else will know how serious it can be.

Be careful.

I always usually remember to put on gloves when I'm working in the garden. And if I'm out collecting, I frock up in full field gear. Wimp? Maybe. I don't really think of it as a test of character.

Update from the Snail Shell

All fun and games here, as you can imagine, with only two weeks to go before the removalists turn up. I'm still packing. Or, more accurately, putting things into piles and then shifting them to other piles and then getting cheesed off with the whole process and transferring my attention to something completely different.

That something completely different is writing. (In a local café, of course, where the floors aren't covered in paperwork and the coffee tastes better.) I have several projects on the go, so when I get stuck on one I can always move onto the next. Not sure if this really is the most efficient way of doing things but it seems to work.

Yesterday, I interrupted what I laughingly claim to be a routine to have my birthday lunch with friends in Carlton. (For the record, Cafe Zum Zum in Rathdowne Street.) This time last year I was birdwatching in Mount Molloy, Far North Queensland, where I almost took a decent photo of a spectacled monarch. This time next year I could be anywhere. But I'm hoping to be eleven months into an indefinite stay in a nice little cottage on the Atherton Tablelands and working on book number three or four.

All I need to do now is find that cottage and buy it.

Musca domestica

Let me here introduce an anecdote of a fly communicated to me by a friend to whom I am indebted for some other remarks. Many years since, I believe about forty, Slingsby, the celebrated opera dancer, with whom I was acquainted, resided in the large house in cross-deep, Twickenham, next to Sir Wathen Waller's, looking down the river. He was, like the author of the 'Gleanings', fond of the study of Natural History, and particularly of insects, and he told me that he once tried to tame some house-flies and preserve them in a state of activity through the winter. For this purpose, quite at the latter end of Autumn, and when they were becoming almost helpless, he selected four from off his breakfast table, put them upon a large handful of cotton, and placed it in one corner of the window nearest the fire-place. Not long afterwards the weather became so cold that all flies disappeared except these four, which constantly left their bed of cotton at his breakfast time, came and fed at the table, and then returned to their home. This continued for a short time, when three of them became lifeless in their shelter and only one came down. This, Slingsby said, he had trained to feed upon his thumb-nail, by placing on it some moist sugar mixed with a little butter. Although there had been at intervals several days of sharp frost, the fly never missed taking his daily meal in this way till after Christmas, when his kind preserver having invited a friend to dine and sleep at his house, the fly the next morning perched upon the thumb of the visitor, who being ignorant that it was a pet of his host's, clapped his hand upon it, and thus put an end to Mr Slingsby's experiment.

Edward Jesse, 1834, Gleanings in Natural History

You rotten swine!

You've deaded me!

Well, no. Not correct on either count. But I have caught something icky and I'm going to lie on the sofa in my tracksuit (which is a strange place to keep a sofa) and drink hot chocolate until it passes. Or I do. One of the two.

And I'll be just like Bluebottle.