Centennial Park

[khiemtran]

Saturday morning and we're at Sydney's Centennial Park, for a birthday party.



Situated right near the heart of the city, the park is lush and green. It's a popular place for city-dwellers to jog, walk or cycle. You can also watch the boys play cricket.



Or the kids learning to ride.



Or you can even hire one of these pedal cars for a cruise around the cycle track.



Shaking hands after the game. Both teams give the other three cheers and every player shakes the hand of every other.



Since today also happens to coincide with the Great Australian Bird Count, we spend twenty minutes counting birds and logging the results via an iphone app.

This is a Noisy Miner. One of the great winners in the ecological lottery. A native bird, their niche just happened to coincide with the same sort of landscape that humans liked to produce, plus they're good at using teamwork to drive away other species.



And this is a crested pigeon, another winner. I don't remember seeing them at all when I was growing up, but now they seem to be everywhere.



And, of course, swans here have always been black.



We were wondering why there seemed to be so many men in shirts walking across the park (typically wearing sunglasses and holding alcohol), then we realised it was race day at the Randwick race course across the road.

Comments

[angelo-giorno.livejournal.com]

good place and great photos

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[carl-allery.livejournal.com]

Great photos - and pleased to see you survived the recent weather. I half expected photos of snow or floods!

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Luckily, we escaped the storms unscathed. The weather's been flicking between winter and summer all this week, which is actually kind of normal for spring over here...

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

The noisy miner is a very appealing-looking bird with a very cute name.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

It's also funny because with a typical Australian (non-rhotic) accent "mynah" and "miner" both sound the same, and the other big winner of the eco lottery was the common mynah, which not only found that humans created the ideal environment for it, but that they would also give them a free trip around the world to enjoy it. So, if you see a small brown bird in a city these days and say it's a miner/mynah, you're probably right.