Macca's Meanderings

 Hi Last weekend we flew into Darwin for the weekend. Laura was flying up to Darwin for a friend's wedding. She had not met niece Amelia yet so I think the wedding was more of an excuse.  Dean, Kristy and their little family.  Aunty Laura meets Amelia. Granny and Pa with our grandchildren - a real blessing.  While in Darwin a friend from Inverness in Scotland was passing through Darwin. It was great catching up with Bev.  Trevor and Leonie were in town for the wedding. Leonie and Nancy met in the maternity ward in Gove hospital back in 1984. We have kept in touch even since.  Recently the Garngi rangers have been busy with our carbon abatement early dry season 'cool' burning. This involves both ground and aerial burning and if done well reduces the amount of carbon that ends up in the atmosphere. We receive some good income from this work.  For the aerial burning we use a Robinson R44 helicopter. The rear left door is removed and an incendiary machine ...

In previous blog posts you may recall me talking about marine debris and ghost nets being an issue around Croker Island. From the air, beaches like the one below look clean however a closer look often reveals a very different situation. In early June we had two officers from the Commonwealth Government's Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (DAFF) here for a few days. During this time they trained us to conduct a Marine Debris Transect Survey. The results were quite alarming!! Read on to find out more. The survey involves marking a section of beach 100 metres by 20 metres. We choose a section of east facing beach near Cape Croker (northern part of Croker Island).  Then we had to pick up all the debris within this marked area, weight it, sort it into 50 categories and then count these categories. The data was then entered into the Biosecurity Topwatch app on our iPads to be sent off to DAFF when we returned to the office and WiFi connection. I won't go through all c...