Our great southern migration

  I spent last week in Sydney as part of the site visit team for Sydney U vet school. I did have roast beef for dinner a couple of times! I didn't really go to market but figured it would be rude to suggest Scott was a little piggy, even though he did stay home.  I am still an AVMA site team member so help ensure that the AVMA accredited schools are meeting the standards agreed to. Schools get reviewed every 7 years. Now that I am in Australia, I get fewer options but Sydney was a good fit. Sydney also gets reviewed by the local group (AVBC) and by the British group (RCVS) since they do have students from Australia, NZ, North America and Britain. The AVMA requires summary documents with 100 pages of reading and 100 pages of tables max. The other groups have different formats and requirements. Putting them all together made for a heck of a lot of reading and triangulating. After doing that initial reading, we asked for even more reading. Finally, we go on site, talk to everyone...

  Why yes, I do often base my image choices on a fun (for me, at least) title. Recency is another factor. We have been taking dozens of pictures a day so I have too many choices, otherwise. The little guy/gal above is a yellow robin. Much smaller than the American red robin but also with a lovely singing voice. They are all over and not super shy. We have lots of pictures of them! There are several pretty yellow birds including the New Holland Honeyeaters (previous post) and the yellow rumped thornbills. The latter are tiny and very flitty so often out of focus.  It is rare to see them this low but you can see the yellow fuzzball, at least. These "goldilocks" birds go with the three roos that were next to the road yesterday:  Because this is a national park (literally, on both sides of us), kangaroos and wallabies are all around us. The group of dad, mom and older kid is less common.  That image looks like mostly kangaroos. Wallabies are smaller with different colori...