Australia Adventures - Queensland
Just came across an interesting article about drunk parrots, glowing gnat larvae and leathery fruit bats in Queensland http://bit.ly/7cvlYN.
The article states:”In Australia they have an expression, “pissed as a parrot”, and if you visit Cedar Creek winery on Tamborine Mountain in Queensland, you will find out why.
Thousands of parrots live there, and many, mostly rainbow lorikeets and king parrots, like to feed on grapes. Some of the fruit ferments on the vine and it goes straight to their heads. “They quite often start fighting each other,” says Bridget on the winery’s front desk. “That can go on for a while. They squawk and carry on. Crazy behaviour. Then they fall off the vines and go to sleep on the ground.” A typical evening out up northern Australia, then? Bridget doesn’t comment.
The winery doesn’t mind, though, and lets the parrots feed. Generous, but then they’re like that. They like nature. They’ve also tried to help out the local glow-worms. Not to be confused with fireflies, which are beetles, glow-worms are the larvae of gnats, and are found only in Australia and New Zealand. Tourists love them, and have been visiting Mount Tamborine’s national park to see them in such vast numbers that the insects got stressed and their colonies shrank. So in 2004 Cedar Creek built a glow-worm cave to divert the tourists. It started with just 100 glow-worms and now has 4,000, making it the largest colony anywhere in the world.”
http://ping.fm/fRs7i
On Australia Adventures you can read more about adventures in Queensland. Look here for other good articles - http://www.australiaadventures.com/brisbane.htm
