Steven Cathery
New Member
Hi all
I'm a local born and bred Adelaide guy, though I moved to Moonta on the Yorke Peninsula as a boy of about 10 when my parents retired there. Moonta was a great place to gain a love for nature, as are many country towns. Before long I had befriended a local beekeeper and started building up a hobby apiary. I had decided at the ripe old age of 10, to become an apiarist. My beekeeper friend became a great mentor and I learned a lot, not as much as I would need to manage a commercial apiary but some lessons are determined to be taught the hard way. About three years later I had almost 20 colonies.
Unfortunately all but three of my colonies succumbed to a heatwave and melted out. I had failed to winter them properly and suffered a huge setback, at which point I decided to give up on beekeeping. Not that I had lost my passion for the bees themselves, but my dad was a little over involved and had turned my hobby into lots and lots of hard work. I should have been going at a more leisurely pace and enjoying my hobby while it still was one. I could have spent much more time and effort on acquiring the knowledge and skills, than on building hives catching swarms etc. Still, I learned and enjoyed what I did and that was well worth the effort.
Moonta has plenty of other wildlife too. I had quite a few other animals such as rescued magpies, a crow and for years I had a terrapin tortoise and seagull (Johnathan Livingston) in the backyard/veranda enclosure. I also used to love bringing sleepy lizards home to de-tick them and give them a nice feed. The idea was also to release them near our home so they might help with snakes, garden pests and vermin. I can remember one time though, my mum had to start getting quite snaky herself. She put her foot down, because I was having sleepovers with my lizards and had over a half a dozen of them running around in my room and the sleep-over was turning into nearly a week long holiday. My house was also a protected sanctuary for any huntsman spider that found it's way in and even some that were found outside and brought in. Lovely harmless old buggers. I was desensitized to handling then at a young age as even my mum would pick them up and take them into another room before using the fly spray.
Eventually I became a typical young guy, grew out of the small town and headed to Adelaide to live with my sister. I have read heaps of pop science including natural history and some genetics and info-science type stuff like chaos, emergent complexity and also did some studies in IT. Before I turned into 'beast mode geek' though I worked for a while as leading hand on a commercial worm farm and learned to care for all the physical needs of fully productive worm farm selling worms by the kilos. That was near Mildura. I have helped many of my friends and family members to setup and keep domestic worm farms and benefit from good soil ecology. This vermicultural experience has also stimulated a long residual interest in waste management and bi-product resource management.
I very briefly got involved with Trees For Life bushcare about 20 years ago. I have always had the odd bird nursing experience through the years. Some 15 years ago, I hand raised a rejected wood dove. Eventually it flew around in the area wild, but I kept a perch with food & water on the back porch. B.B. (Bird Brain) would fly down out of a tree whenever I got home and land on my shoulder.
More recently (year before last?) I ended up living in town and for some reason I had a spate (about 7) of bird rescue opportunities, including a rainbow lorikieet who spent about 3 weeks in my care. I released it expecting to never see it again. Two weeks latter I was in Hungry Jacks and my friend called me out onto the footpath, pointing at something in the bench. I walk out and there is may little lorikeet waiting for me to walk over and pick him up. He spent about three hours with me that day, before he flew off. He wasn't hungry; didn't need a drink; just came to see me.
That was about when I joined friends of the zoo, as discovered how the team down there are so incredibly kind and helpful that they give people some advice or help for their sick/injured wildlife I came to see the vets on two or three occasions and was delighted at the great advice and oversight they provided for me. Earlier that year I even rescued a little ring tail possum. Coincidently it was near the zoo entrance.
I now have a bit of a thing for systems analysis and experimenting on the frontiers of emergent technology. My technological interests have taken me into areas that introduced me to communities and movements upholding somewhat libertarian values and to cut a long story short, a raft of new technological methods are emerging, to bring those values to bare on the archaic political ruling classes. There exists now, the potential to have a peaceful revolution. Meanwhile the need is dire, to put the environment and the local ecology, back onto the highest footing of social values in such a way that the relationship between 'social concern' and 'political action' actually has a causal connection and so that objective, meaningful incentives are instigated to create reward structures, transparency and accountability for those who have power to wield.
That is how I wish to contribute my experience and hopefully create lasting value for worthy causes.
That's about it for my nutshell intro. I got a bit long towards the end, but then, I have been around for over 50 years now, so the nutshell has expanded. Looking forward to stopping by here in the future. See you in the soup.
Stevo.
I'm a local born and bred Adelaide guy, though I moved to Moonta on the Yorke Peninsula as a boy of about 10 when my parents retired there. Moonta was a great place to gain a love for nature, as are many country towns. Before long I had befriended a local beekeeper and started building up a hobby apiary. I had decided at the ripe old age of 10, to become an apiarist. My beekeeper friend became a great mentor and I learned a lot, not as much as I would need to manage a commercial apiary but some lessons are determined to be taught the hard way. About three years later I had almost 20 colonies.
Unfortunately all but three of my colonies succumbed to a heatwave and melted out. I had failed to winter them properly and suffered a huge setback, at which point I decided to give up on beekeeping. Not that I had lost my passion for the bees themselves, but my dad was a little over involved and had turned my hobby into lots and lots of hard work. I should have been going at a more leisurely pace and enjoying my hobby while it still was one. I could have spent much more time and effort on acquiring the knowledge and skills, than on building hives catching swarms etc. Still, I learned and enjoyed what I did and that was well worth the effort.
Moonta has plenty of other wildlife too. I had quite a few other animals such as rescued magpies, a crow and for years I had a terrapin tortoise and seagull (Johnathan Livingston) in the backyard/veranda enclosure. I also used to love bringing sleepy lizards home to de-tick them and give them a nice feed. The idea was also to release them near our home so they might help with snakes, garden pests and vermin. I can remember one time though, my mum had to start getting quite snaky herself. She put her foot down, because I was having sleepovers with my lizards and had over a half a dozen of them running around in my room and the sleep-over was turning into nearly a week long holiday. My house was also a protected sanctuary for any huntsman spider that found it's way in and even some that were found outside and brought in. Lovely harmless old buggers. I was desensitized to handling then at a young age as even my mum would pick them up and take them into another room before using the fly spray.
Eventually I became a typical young guy, grew out of the small town and headed to Adelaide to live with my sister. I have read heaps of pop science including natural history and some genetics and info-science type stuff like chaos, emergent complexity and also did some studies in IT. Before I turned into 'beast mode geek' though I worked for a while as leading hand on a commercial worm farm and learned to care for all the physical needs of fully productive worm farm selling worms by the kilos. That was near Mildura. I have helped many of my friends and family members to setup and keep domestic worm farms and benefit from good soil ecology. This vermicultural experience has also stimulated a long residual interest in waste management and bi-product resource management.
I very briefly got involved with Trees For Life bushcare about 20 years ago. I have always had the odd bird nursing experience through the years. Some 15 years ago, I hand raised a rejected wood dove. Eventually it flew around in the area wild, but I kept a perch with food & water on the back porch. B.B. (Bird Brain) would fly down out of a tree whenever I got home and land on my shoulder.
More recently (year before last?) I ended up living in town and for some reason I had a spate (about 7) of bird rescue opportunities, including a rainbow lorikieet who spent about 3 weeks in my care. I released it expecting to never see it again. Two weeks latter I was in Hungry Jacks and my friend called me out onto the footpath, pointing at something in the bench. I walk out and there is may little lorikeet waiting for me to walk over and pick him up. He spent about three hours with me that day, before he flew off. He wasn't hungry; didn't need a drink; just came to see me.
That was about when I joined friends of the zoo, as discovered how the team down there are so incredibly kind and helpful that they give people some advice or help for their sick/injured wildlife I came to see the vets on two or three occasions and was delighted at the great advice and oversight they provided for me. Earlier that year I even rescued a little ring tail possum. Coincidently it was near the zoo entrance.
I now have a bit of a thing for systems analysis and experimenting on the frontiers of emergent technology. My technological interests have taken me into areas that introduced me to communities and movements upholding somewhat libertarian values and to cut a long story short, a raft of new technological methods are emerging, to bring those values to bare on the archaic political ruling classes. There exists now, the potential to have a peaceful revolution. Meanwhile the need is dire, to put the environment and the local ecology, back onto the highest footing of social values in such a way that the relationship between 'social concern' and 'political action' actually has a causal connection and so that objective, meaningful incentives are instigated to create reward structures, transparency and accountability for those who have power to wield.
That is how I wish to contribute my experience and hopefully create lasting value for worthy causes.
That's about it for my nutshell intro. I got a bit long towards the end, but then, I have been around for over 50 years now, so the nutshell has expanded. Looking forward to stopping by here in the future. See you in the soup.
Stevo.
