In the last few months we made too many pictures but we have not updated our photo gallery so often.  To solve this problem we had the idea: why not regularly post one of our pictures on the blog?

So here is the first ‘picture of the day’ in the series:  this golden orb-weaving spider. It is often seen in parks or in bush area in Sydney during summer time. This season - late summer/ beginning of autumn - is the time for her female to lay her egg.

These spiders are a bit frightening for the first time but they bite rarely. They use to weave a web with a golden colour, which is especially apparent in the sunshine.  The web is so big, that it not only catches insects for food, but sometimes small birds as well…Yeah, it is a bit funny when you are going on the footpath and the orb is just only a half meter above your head… The female is much larger than the male: her body has the size of a knuckle and with the black legs with golden bends it reaches the size of the palm of my hand. This and this websites contain more information about these spiders.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Maybe the most famous living creature in Australia is the Kangaroo. Everybody gets really excited when they see a Kangaroo for the first time. So did we, when we had the chance for the first time. It is amazing to see a group of Kangaroos hopping around in the wild. When you are careful, you can approach them up to a few meters when they are eating in the grass. They will stop eating, and stare at you with a rather silly look. But probably not as silly as the way you are staring at themJ

Kangaroos are very cute animals, especially if you see a small kangaroo, a joey in the pouch of its mother.  They don’t look like any other European or American animal, but they are not as different as you think they are. Actually kangaroos have almost the same genome as you have!

This discovery was presented last week by Australian scientists of the Centre of Excellence for Kangaroo Genomics. There are about 20,000 genes in the kangaroo’s genome, which is about the same size as the human genome. In fact there are great chunks of the human genome sitting right there in the kangaroo genome. The discovery is an important model for understanding human development and will help understand how our genes work. Furthermore it will have significant implications for cancer research. For all the details of the research you can have a look at the KanGO website.

About 150 million years ago, kangaroos and humans were family of each other. The marsupials first evolved in China, but migrated through the American continents first to Antarctica and later to Australia.

So if you meet a Kangaroo again, don’t look at it as a silly animal, you are just one of them!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

On the day you arrive in Australia, one of the first things you notice are the different birds, different plants and trees and even a different smell in the streets. If you have grown up here, you probably are used to all of this, but for the rest of the world the Australian birds seem large, beautiful, maybe a bit aggressive, but especially loud, very loud!

You never know what you can expect, because the only birds looking familiar are the pigeons and seagull, the rest is almost undiscovered territory. Any sound can be related to anything.

One of my first impressions kept me awake for quite a while. It was literally the first day I moved to Australia and I did not have a place to live yet. I stayed in the lodge of my work, which is in a nice suburb of Sydney with many trees. Early in the morning I woke up, still with a jetlag, suddenly realising that the place is surrounded by monkeys! Now this is kind of weird: you are in Australia, so you can expect kangaroos, koalas, dangerous snakes and spiders everywhere, but no monkeys.

The next morning someone made sure, that there are indeed no monkeys, the sound was from a kookaburra. How do you say? You have to repeat this several times and ask how to spell the name of this bird. The sound of the Kookaburra is getting familiar now, you can hear it almost every day and I actually like it, but still the first thing that comes to mind is “monkey-bird”.

Try to say: “Oeh-Ah-Ah-Oe-Ah-Oe-Ah-Oe-Oe-Oe-Oe-Ah-Oe-Ah-Ah-Ah”.

Now repeat this several times as fast and as loud as you can with a high voice and put in a few more “Oehs” and “Ahs” randomly.

This is more or less the sound of a kookaburra, now if you want to check how you are doing, or you are reading this in your office, and you feel a bit embarrassed to making yourself look like a fool, here is an example of the kookaburra sound.

The kookaburra is very popular animal in Australia, and is “used” in many places. There are post stamps with kookaburras, and the Australian men’s hockey team is better known as “the Kookaburras”.

• For more information you can see Wikipedia.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!