Hello everyone, welcome to the show. I'm skipping a traditional intro this week because we're doing something a little different.

It's been a while since we've talked about sort of a travelogue experience in the woods.

And the wonderful Sarah Johnson is here.

Hi, everyone.

And we're going to talk to about a recent trip we took to southern Australia. But first, I just want to get this out of the way and say, hey, if you like this show, please consider supporting it. The best way to do that is to become a patron over at patreon.com slash In Defense of Plants. A little bit of contribution each month goes a long way in ensuring this show has a future. I would not be doing this without the support of

my patrons. So thank you to them. You can also buy a copy of my book. Some of our customizable merch and

stickers and all of those can be found or at indefenseplants.com. I put all the links in the show notes

for indefenseplants.com slash podcast. But hi, Sarah. Hello. How are you? I'm good. Thank you for taking the

time out of your schedule to do this with me today. We thought about doing it in the field, but sometimes

you just got to enjoy the experience, right? And we had no idea what we were looking at 90% at the

time, because it was all very new to us.

That's also a big part of it is we had to actually identify 99.9% of the stuff we were seeing. And I don't know, a podcast of us being like, well, that's cool. What's that? I don't know. Just didn't seem that exciting. So you're getting a post hoc. Also, I forgot the little muff or whatever you call it, the little... Oh, it was very windy.

Fuzzy thing that goes over the microphone, so you would have just heard a lot of blooms. also I forgot the little muff or whatever you call it the little oh it was very windy fuzzy thing

that goes over the microphone so you would have just heard a lot of blustery noises but uh it's really

really hard to encompass two weeks in australia for first time nature nuts like us so we're just

picking a subset of species today to talk to you about some of the encounters

we saw and go from there. There's plenty more. Keep your eye on our social media accounts because

that's where a lot of these cool updates will be coming from. But I'm going to let you kick it off.

Give us your initial impressions and some of the first things that stuck out to you.

I agree that it's hard to encapsulate all of the cool nature we saw while we were gone.

I also feel like, you know, I've mentioned this before, but we have some sort of magic that I think makes other people envious sometimes that when we go out in nature we see some really wild things. We ticked quite a lot of wildlife off our list, not just plants. And,

you know, wildlife that sometimes people who've lived there their entire life don't see. So I feel

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