Wild BNE

Echidnas, "Super Moons" and the World's Most Colourful Bug The weather has been hit-and-miss this month, and the winter chill has certainly set in. I managed to make my maiden voyage to Oxley Creek Common on a nice sunny day however, and was impressed with its well-maintained tracks and revegetation areas. Willie Wagtail (Rhipidura leucophrys), Rocklea

In some ways, I must have been a dream kid for my parents to raise. I brought home report cards filled with glowing praise and recommendations from teachers. I had an inbuilt respect for authority that more or less guided me to make the right decisions at any given time. I was good-natured with enough friends to easily fill out a birthday party, and I had a lot of interests. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if my parents wished I had just a few less interests, or at least more "normal" ones. While other kids dragged their parents to Saturday morning sports games, I would make mine rise at 4:30am so that we could all get to the Mount Glorious rainforest in time for the sunrise. Sometimes we'd arrive so early that it would still actually be night time, and we'd have to wait in the car until the darkness turned to early morning grey. Then we'd begin to carefully navigate the forest trail - which we always had to ourselves. You might think this sounds like a won...

Meandering through some of Brisbane's biggest suburbs, the banks of Kedron Brook must almost be as busy as the Brisbane River as far as recreational use is concerned. If you have lived in or near the suburbs of Ferny Grove, Everton Park, Stafford, Lutwyche or Toombul, chances are that Kedron Brook has been a place for you to meet up with friends, walk your dog beside or base your exercise routine along. When I visited it today - a gloriously sunny autumn Sunday - there were crowds of people using it for all these purposes. I can now confirm that it is a great location for another activity - dip-netting for water bugs! Jogging is just so passé!

Brisbane residents have a strange relationship with Moreton Bay. We look at its calm blue waters and long for the surging surf of the Gold Coast instead. We feel intimidated by the wilderness of its untamed spaces and try to control what we can - a cycleway here, a canal estate there. Then we fly to far flung corners of the world to have experiences we might have found in our own watery backyards after all. I've been guilty of this too, I must admit. It wasn't until I strolled along the coast of Cornwall and sunbathed on the shores of the Great Lakes that I realised I had never appreciated the beauty of the environment I was born into. Now, when I see a film or television show where some neurotic New Yorkers head off to the Hamptons for the weekend, I feel privileged to have a beach of comparable quality close at hand. And so it is today that I found myself wandering along the creamy sands of Redcliffe's Queens Beach. Queen's Beach

OK, I know it seems odd that I should start my blog about the wildlife of Brisbane and surrounds by writing about the wildlife of Sydney instead, but I have a good reason which I will explain shortly. First, let me introduce myself! My name is Christian and I am a soon-to-be-thirty-year-old man who has returned to Brisbane after living everywhere else between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-nine. Much of this time was spent in Sydney and London, where I increasingly left behind my passion for nature as a "kid thing" and replaced it with a zest for nightlife, partying and travel. It wasn't until a disastrous move to and from Toronto that this began to change. In 2011, after a brief holiday and a fling-turned-relationship there, I moved to that friendly city with the hopes of making it my permanent base. What I hadn't counted on, however, was that Canada hadn't been as fortunate as Australia had been during the Global Financial Crisis, and full-time work was nig...