Our day on the Tilligerry Habitat volunteers rota is Sunday and it comes as a bit of a relief at the moment as it makes us take a break from the, seemingly endless, concreting. We try to arrive about an hour before we have to open up so we can have a good look around for any koalas because it is good to be able to direct visitors to where they should see one, they are very tricky to find but Ian has got pretty good at spotting them. We were out of luck this weekend but the following day,while at the Habitat again doing some work on their website, Ian phoned me to say there were two koalas there and to bring my camera.
Two koalas together is a bit of a treat and when I arrived we went to find them. We were happily taking a few pictures of a very handsome koala and his lady friend when we heard a third koala in the bush. Koalas make a terrible grunting noise which cannot be mistaken for anything else and the male heard it at the same time as us (you can tell he is a male by the dark scent gland in the middle of his chest which he uses to mark trees). Bull koalas keep about a kilometre distance from each other and don't take too kindly to other males encroaching on their patch so he climbed down the tree and set off to see if this was a female to make friends with, or a male, in which case a scrap was on the cards. 
There are loads of beautiful walks around our home and we are still finding new ones. Last week we stumbled upon yet another path and followed it as it took us along a fire trail (a manmade track cut in the trees to be used as access by the firefighters in the event of a bushfire) and past some ponds. It was a very hot day so we did not see as many birds as we would expect to and turned back because Monty was starting to complain. On our return journey we sat and had a beer in a picnic shelter overlooking the spot where a ferry used to run from our town across the bay to Nelson Bay. This is only a couple of kilometres by sea but a forty minute drive by road. The ferry was destroyed in a storm about a year before we moved here and there is no sign of a replacement.

Australia is all about outdoor living and they seem to think of everything, the shelter we were taking a rest in was specially deigned for wheelchair users, what a nice touch.