Uneventful journey down there apart from getting stuck in ferkin Bunbury.
If you travel south on the South Western Highway, there are absolutely no signs telling you how to get on to the Bussell Highway -- none whatsoever and you end up in WA's second largest city, the utterly uninteresting maze that is Bunbury.
Took me three locals before I could get coherent directions out of there.
In fact, it took me three locals before I could get any coherence (tout court, as we say in Minjup).
Maybe they want tourists to get trapped in their loony bin of a city and never find their way out.
Probably why it took so long to get any coherence: most of the population are tourists who got stuck and gradually regressed to the local IQ norm, which is somewhere around room temperature on a cool day.
If you happen to be going that way, turn off for Dardanup and head through Boyanup to Capel.
At least until they do the right thing: nuke Bunbury and build a freeway through it.
All of this inconvenience was amply compensated on Saturday.
After breakfast in Margaret River (a place now more onanistic than Fremantle), headed straight for Eagles Heritage.
Wonderful, as on several previous visits, to see birds of prey rescued from accidents, cruelty and poisoning.
But even more wonderful to find that the "live handling" demonstration was with none other than ... yeh ... Tyto alba.
This I swear and offer the following photograhic evidence.
Here we see the lovely Nancy with Echo the Barn Owl, runt of the litter (or whatever a bunch of baby owls are called -- "micro-parliament" or "brood"?) and hand-reared.Now he's an "education bird".
Always wanted to meet one of those.
Got lots of nice pics when Nancy came back after the display, just for me, so I could get close-ups.
There were plenty of Frogmouths too.
But they were determined to keep out of range.
So no good pics of them.
But I did hear a story about someone who found a Frogmouth in the back of her car after leaving the tailgate open over night.
So maybe they're not so elusive -- just difficult to spot when they do their impersonation of a lump of wood.
This shows pretty much what I mean:
Just because you can't see it, hear it, touch it, smell it ... doesn't mean it's not there.So much for empiricism.
But let's not go this far!
Sledge
