Monthly Archives: January 2009

Thomsons Lake Crakes

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Went to Thomsons Lake last week with Martin Cake for a bit of a look.
With Martin’s expertise we saw all three of the common crakes for the area:

  • Baillon’s Crake (Porzana pusilla);
  • Australian Spotted Crake (Porzana fluminea);
  • Spotless Crake (Porzana tabuensis).
They were all seen in the typha at the southern end within a few metres of each other!
Also seen was a tiger snake and a feral fox (inside the perimeter fence at the northern end of the lake).

Red-eared Firetail

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My first new sighting for the year!

Red-eared Firetail (Stagnopleura oculata) – a small group (about 4) seen at Lesmurdie Falls. I managed to take some photographs but they were for identification only.

Lesmurdie Falls is local to me now – the birding there is quite good. There is still a fair bit of water flowing and most of the (unburnt) vegetation is thick and green. Also seen:

  • Tawny Frogmouth (Podargus strigoides);
  • Splendid Fairy-wren (Malurus splendens);
  • Common Bronzewing (Phaps chalcoptera).

Hot rod 7500

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I have finally finished building (I think) my hot rod Power Mac 7500.  It has:

  • 256MB of RAM (using 4 of the 8 slots in case I find some more 64MB sticks);
  • An IBM 18GB SCSI disk;
  • A PowerLogix PowerForce G3 350/175/512K G3 (Spartan) upgrade card running at 300MHz;
  • A fairly generic USB 1.1 PCI card;
  • An Apple Fast Ethernet 10/100 Base-T PCI card;
  • An iXMicro Ultimate Rez Twin Turbo 128 PCI graphics card;
  • An AppleVision 1710 Display.
Everything else (floppy and CD drive) is stock.  It runs Mac OS 8.6 like lightning.