Will You Help Save A Black Cockatoo, Today?
Be involved in saving your cockatoos
Support a project in your back yard!
Our Black Cockatoos are seriously threatened by the consistent clearing of their habitat and the ever depleting groundwater resources on the Swan Coastal Plain.
The Kaarakin Black Cockatoo Rescue Centre are raising funds for Black Cockatoo conservation through a project which will distribute DVDs to schools and P&C Associations in Perth.
Education is the key!
By donating, you will be supporting current and future education opportunities for our children about Black Cockatoos and their lives.
You will be supporting Kaarakin in its mission to ‘protect, rehabilitate and release endangered species of Australian wildlife’.
Every donation no matter how small is valuable to this project!
You can make your donation right now, with PayPal. Please do it now!
Donations of all amounts are very welcome!
“On a Wing and a Prayer” follows the incredible life cycle of the Carnaby’s cockatoo through the engaging story of one small cockatoo family. Capturing a remarkable “never filmed before” journey of life and hope for one of Australia’s most loved, but critically, endangered birds.
Recently screened Australia-wide on the ABC , this inspiring and educational film received rave reviews and will shortly be available on DVD as a fundraising project for Kaarakin.
This project will raise funds to support the ongoing work of Kaarakin, in its mission to protect, rehabilitate and release endangered species of Australian wildlife – including our Black Cockatoos
Kaarakin Fundraising Project Overview
Kaarakin Fundraising Project Overview
We are about to roll out our fund raising campaign to 5,000 schools across Australia and this is an overview of the whole project. Please click on the link to open the report as a PDF:
Beginning in mid August 2012, in conjunction with Our Online Canteen, an advertising campaign will be delivered in print and online to 5,000 schools and P&C associations across Australia – working through the canteen facilities of each school.
Each school will receive a high quality printed booklet, promoting the services of Our Online Canteen, which is already well accepted in five states of Australia. The booklet will also include a full page promotion for Stories My Nana Tells
With each booklet will be a professionally designed promotional flyer for the Kaarakin Black Cockatoo Rescue Centre and delivery envelopes will be overprinted with a cockatoo motif – to draw attention to the flyer.
Each booklet with carry a small, coloured promotion within its pages for the project and Stories My Nana Tells will offer a cash incentive to P&C Associations whose members become subscribers to their service.
The project is well designed and thought through and we expect it to be a great success.
Will YOU Help A Black Cockatoo?
If YOU want to help, please do!
Donations of all amounts are very welcome, to help launch this project. You will be very welcome as a Kaarakin Hero!
If you want to support Kaarakin’s project and pay through EFT transfer or by cheque, Email Us Here
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Grandparents need good stuff for children online to share with their family, especially for kid’s birthdays. School teachers and parents who supervise homework or home school are always looking for stories for kids and good websites for children. They use Facebook and Twitter as well as search engines, like Google and Yahoo, to source reliable and engaging education material for online reading from websites for children as well as for use in their school’s classes.
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If you find good links to share, please do it! If you like our stories, please share us with your family and friends. We would love to hear from you, too. We love comments and we love to share!
An Echidna For Your Birthday, Angus.
Angus And The Echidna.
Once upon a time, there was a little boy called Angus. He was having a birthday and he got a special surprise. On his back lawn, in the morning, was a magic red helicopter!
It only looked small but when he got up close he could see there was a Nana in there and she said “hop in, Angus and let’s go for a birthday ride.” Angus hopped in and away they went – all the way to Australia in the twinkling of an eye.
“What are we going to see in Australia, Nana?” asked Angus. “We are going to see an echidna,” she told him. “They live in Australia and they look like a hedgehog but they are not even cousins.”
It’s not easy to find an echidna, even for a Nana in a helicopter. First, she and Angus flew over the desert to see what they could find.
They found a big goanna, who lives in the red sand of the desert but he didn’t know where they would find an echidna. “They don’t live in my desert,” he said. He knew what an echidna was, though. “I don’t want to meet one, anyway. They have too many prickles for me and I couldn’t eat one,” he said. Nana and Angus flew away, still looking. Angus said “How does he know what an echidna looks like, if they don’t live in his desert?”
Nana and Angus flew to the bush near where Nana lived. “Let’s see who else we can find, Angus,” she said. “What would you like?”
“I would like to see a kangaroo, please,” said Angus. “And a koala bear as well, if we can.” Angus is very polite and always says ‘Please’ “Easily done!” said Nana and the helicopter landed on the lawn near her house. Much to Angus’s surprise, there were some kangaroos just sitting there looking at them in their magic red helicopter. “They come every day to my house,” Nana told Angus. “They don’t eat the garden and they are very friendly.”
“We will have to fly up the road a bit, to see a koala and do you know are not actually a bear? They are just a koala!”
While Angus and Nana were sitting in the helicopter watching the kangaroos, Angus heard someone laughing at them. It was such a strange sound, he was a bit startled. “What is that, Nana?” he asked. “What is making that funny laughing sound? I don’t feel funny and we don’t look funny either.”
“Don’t be worried by them, Angus,” said Nana. “They are just kookaburras and they laugh like that all the time. They won’t hurt YOU but they do catch snakes; they eat mice and sometimes they do steal baby birds. They tease my Dalmatian, Pepper, and she chases them up and down the block. She hates it when she thinks they are laughing at her.”
While Nana and Angus were sitting in the magic red helicopter, watching the kangaroos, they saw a strange little animal with a very funny walk. It was the ECHIDNA, just about to disappear down a hole!
The Echidna has spines, a long snout and strong claws. When they walk, they seem to roll from side to side, as if they were walking on a ship instead of on the land.
“A baby Echidna is called a “puggle”; its mother lays an egg and carries it in a pouch on her tummy. Kangaroos have pouches too, deep ones like a real pocket. An Echidna pouch is not much more than a fold in the skin on the outside of the mummy’s tummy, where she doesn’t have any spines. The egg hatches after about ten days and the baby Echidna is the size of a jelly bean,” Nana said. Angus was amazed! “It just grabs hold of a teat in the pouch and the mother keeps it in there until it starts to grow its spines,” Nana told him. “After that, she leaves it at home while she goes out feeding. And what, young Angus, do you think they eat? “
Angus slowly shook his head and said “Nana, I don’t know.”
“Before I tell you, Angus, we have to see one more amazing Australian animal” said Nana, as she and Angus flew away again in the magic red helicopter “and then it will be time for you to go back home for your Birthday party.”
With a flash of red, they landed in a special place in the forest down south and Nana said “Sssshhhh! Look!” Angus looked and looked and he couldn’t see anything. “Over there, look!” Nana pointed and Angus took a deep breath. “What is that tiny little thing? Is it a sort of wild kitten? It’s only very small.”
Nana laughed. “That is something hardly anyone has ever seen, but I have! That is a NUMBAT! It is totally harmless and very shy. There are not many left in the wild, but in our magic red helicopter we know where to come to see them.” Angus was impressed but he hadn’t forgotten what Nana had said about what Echidna’s eat, that they had to see the Numbat first before she would tell him.
“Tell me, Nana,” said Angus. “Why did we have to see the Numbat before you told me what the Echidna eats?” Nana smiled. “Because, Angus, they both eat the same thing and that is almost the only thing they eat. They eat TERMITES! 1,000s and 1,000s of termites every day. They are a very environmentally friendly way to deal with ants and termites (including digging up their eggs).
A Numbat will eat about 20,000 termites a day and an Echidna can eat up to 2kg of termites in a single meal.
Angus was very impressed. “This has been a fantastic Birthday, Nana. I have got so much to tell when I get home. Is it time to go, now?”
“Yes, Angus. It has been a lot of fun. As we scoot on back to your home and your party, we will make one quick stop for you to see a koala but don’t be too surprised if it doesn’t even know you are there. They sleep all day!” Sure enough, when they landed near the koala tree, he was sleeping.
“Too bad, koala,” said Angus. “I am going home to have a Birthday and you don’t even know I came to see you.”
“Don’t worry, Angus,” Nana said. “I will tell him that you came on your Birthday.”
It took no time at all for the magic red helicopter to whisk Angus home and land on the back lawn. He gave Nana a hug and tumbled out of the helicopter – running towards his house. He stopped, waved and watched Nana and her helicopter fly away.
“Happy Birthday, Angus!”she called. “We hope you have a lovely day. We hope to see you again, very soon.”
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**Acknowledgement: The lovely Numbat photo in this story is published with the permission of the photographer Panda Broad. On my first trip to Nannup, I did see a Numbat in the forest, but it was a night and I was not able to photograph it. This numbat was photographed by Panda only a few hundred yards further into the forest, in broad daylight.
Another Fig Tree
Another Fig Tree
One day, I met a friend of mine for lunch and we settled on meeting at the Cloisters in St George’s Terrace at the top of Mill Street. We stopped alongside the big Port Jackson Fig Tree at the entrance, to chat about how it was saved when the huge building behind it, Mt. Newman House, was constructed in the 1970’s.
The architects were Howlett & Bailey, my husband Robbie (better known as Growly Granddad to our readers) worked for Jeff Howlett as a construction supervisor on other projects and I remember Jeff telling us about how the tree was saved.
Designed in 1858, the Cloisters was built by convicts to be a school for the sons of well-to-do colonial settlers in Perth. There were not enough sons to make the school a long term success, although some of its famous students included John Forrest. It has been used as a school for girls, a training school for priests and a hostel for students at UWA. Its designer, Richard Roach Jewell has left a huge legacy of iconic buildings in Perth, besides the Cloisters. He was Chief Architect of the Town Hall, designed the Wesley Church and the beautiful Deanery next to St. George’s Cathedral. [Read more...]
What Kind Of Blogger Are You?
What Kind Of Blogger Are You?
Blogging, (writing in an online website log), springs from a range of motives. Yours may be to share information; to build your business profile as an expert in your field; to provide advice and support or simply to feel happy. People blog to feel connected and to express things in a way they cannot do, in spoken form.
Publishing a blog allows us to reach out to people we know and those we don’t, with ideas, views, comments and our reactions to circumstances and events. In reaching out, we invite contact by way of comments from those who read our writing. In Nana’s Blog we tend to write about things that are quirky and a bit off the beaten track – without having to be too serious or as in depth as we are when we write our premium stories. It’s pretty important to be able to engage parents and grandparents with the stories we write for free, to engage them as potential future subscribers for Stories My Nana Tells.
For Love or Money?
Blogging has also become a recognised way of earning money, by writing product reviews and articles for which the blogger is paid or given product for payment in kind. Money is also earned by either income generated by advertising, like Google Adwords on the blogger’s site or the owner being paid to place banner advertisements on their blog.
Since that kind of blogging is done purely for money, having a good network is critical to being able [Read more...]
Octopus’s Garden
“I’d like to be under the sea in an octopus’s garden in the shade.
We would shout and swim about the coral that lies beneath the waves.”
Ringo Starr wrote this song for The Beatles in 1969. He says “I wrote Octopus’s Garden in Sardinia. Peter Sellers had lent us his yacht and we went out for the day… I stayed out on deck with [the captain] and we talked about octopuses. He told me that they hang out in their caves and they go around the seabed finding shiny stones and tin cans and bottles to put in front of their cave like a garden.”
This inspired him to write the song which was featured in the Beatle’s movie “Yellow Submarine”.
Octopuses really are amazing creatures. They are very intelligent and live in cave-like dens in the rocks. They often close up the front of the cave with rocks and shells, leaving only a small entry hole through which they virtually ooze, coming and going from their homes. When they catch their prey, especially crabs, they return to their dens to dine. Their garden is the collection of bones, spines, and shells left over from previous meals along with any shiny things [Read more...]
Should You Be Your Grandchildren’s Friend On Facebook?
This is an interesting question and it will get a lot of different answers, depending on family relationships and locations.
There are a lot of positives of being a Facebook Friend with your Grandchildren
It helps you keep in touch, especially if they live far away from you: interstate, overseas or in the country. It is amazing how far just a little “Like” click on one of their posts will go, in letting them know you are thinking of them.
Rather than being a way of spying on them, it’s an unobtrusive way of reaching out [Read more...]
One Hundred Heroes
Living in the hills in Stoneville for many years, our iconic red tailed black cockatoos kept me company on many a lazy afternoon while the Eagles battled on the football field or the Carnaby’s white tails sent my Dad running as they showered him with “honkey nuts”. We watched them raise their babies; tease Burt, our pink and grey galah and as a kitten, Splinter was fearless in confronting them in the branches of the banksia.
Marri trees covered with their intense white blossoms gave us “summer snow” every autumn; when March flies appear from nowhere to feast on the nectar and us, and a short time later uncountable tonnes of white stamens drift down to fill the kerbs to overflowing. Driving along Stoneville Road towards to Mundaring, for all those years, I knew little of the critical future now faced by our white and red tailed black cockatoos.
For the past six months, through meetings and public protests; Facebook, blog posts at Stories My Nana Tells and other social media sites, a lot of friends and I have been engaged in a campaign to bring their plight to the attention of [Read more...]
One Cup Of Top Of Milk
When we were young, the milk lady used to bring the milk around on her horse and cart. Her name was Maria, I think. She was Italian and, to my mind at the time, all Italian ladies were called Maria.
On the cart were huge silver steel cans and Maria would ladle the milk directly from them into our billy can, complete with its own lid. She came every day and I never thought about how many cows she might have had, or where they were housed. We lived in Big Bell, a gold mining town inland in Western Australia. It was hot. The earth was red and dusty. The milk was always creamy and white – and we never considered how Maria might tend her cows in that climate.
My mother cooked on a wood stove, cream and green with a Kookaburra on the door of the oven, and on the side hob she would bring the milk to a very gentle heat to scald it. We did not have a refrigerator. After an hour or so, the cream [Read more...]
What Kind Of Grandparents Do You Have In Your Family?
Nana and Pop Beaton – Grandparents on my mother’s side.
Family life is a bit different now to what it was when I was growing up. People are living longer; families are often “blended” families – having been through changes due to death, divorce or separation of the children’s parents, and families are often spread across the country or even the world. This can make it harder for Grandparents to provide the traditional role of days past.
If both parents are working, often Grandparents are needed to help with primary childcare or the support of a child who has special needs. With the rise of the Fly In Fly Out (FIFO) workforce, Grandparents can be invaluable in supporting the individual parent at home.
The African proverb is that “it takes a village to raise a child.” So, the [Read more...]