The Wild I See

Every September the West Coast explodes into the most amazing colours. Knowing this, Jem and I decided to take a day trip up to Posberg Flower Reserve (West Coast National Park) to soak it all in. I get the same stoked feeling every time I see the flowers and always end up in such awe that a phenomenon like this isn't staged by some supernatural force. Fields and fields of flowers unfurled to the sun, flaunting their saturated petals at buzzers-by. Monkey beetles, flies, wasps, bees and countless other critters whizzing from inflorescence to inflorescence spreading pollen throughout these floral metropolises. The insects are followed by the birds... and so many of them! This truly is a time for the birds and the bees; pollination at its best.

It was a Sunday morning and my gumboot-wedded feet and I were strolling languidly through a landscape carpeted in snow. It stretched all the way up the valley and past the scoria cones where it hugged the majestic peaks of the interior with a delightful frigidity. The air was so crisp and still; a tranquil remnant of the storm’s wake. The only inklings of sound were the distant murmurs of chattering king penguins and the intermittent cries of giant petrels. I thought about how strangely dinosaur-like these petrels sounded and began imagining them as the reptiles from which they descended. I came across a colony and stopped and stared at them like a Japanese tourist; my brain twitching as it tried to unravel the immediate mysteries surrounding the evolution of birds from dinosaurs. Why did dinosaurs suddenly develop feathers? What did they use them for if they couldn’t fly? And how did they even develop feathers in the first place? I thought about this long and hard and eventually ...