Sea bug

This morning we went to the beach straight after breakfast. There was a surf carnival on so the only part of the beach available was a small strip at the end near the rock pools. But we had a nice dip and found lots of interesting sea creatures: crabs scuttling over rocks, hermit crabs crawling over each other, blackberry shells that we could move to new spots on the rocks, green and red sea anemones that tried to suck in our fingers and toes, little fish darting around in the rock pools. And on the beach, a tiny bug making a track in the wet sand. I put it in a jar with a little sand and water and brought it home.

Here are a couple of its legs:

Here you can see one of its eyes:

Podargus

Louka and I were walking through the trees in the park collecting feathers when we saw something sitting on the path in front of us. It was clearly the bird that had dropped most of the feathers: a tawny frogmouth. It watched as we got quite close to it, and I wondered if it was injured. Then when we tried to go around it, it flew to the nearest branch.