Wildlife and Fire wood

We seem to have a kangaroo wandering through not just the hay paddock but also sauntering past the Studio front windows in the morning.
Tonight he was in the hay paddock and I went out to make sure he wasn't looking at my strawberry patch in the old wheelbarrow. I spoke to him and he wasn't the least bit interested in what I had to say. In fact I wondered if he could actually see me I got so close to him. I don't mind one of them but I will not be amused if he brings along all his other relations which live up the road a bit.

The bronze wing pigeon is still hanging around and has a mate booming away in the distance.
I find them a curious bird as they land quite a way from the pond and then walk in for their drink. That takes quite a while too as he wants to make sure there is no danger lurking behind the rocks. The colours in their wings are so lovely
and this time he displayed them for me to capture it on the photo.The crested pigeon is also considered a kind of bronze wing.

 The Tawny frogmouths  were in the vines again the other day but since then I haven't seen them
not even in the Pepper tree which they frequent .
The Murray Magpies are nesting again, sitting on a new batch of eggs in the same nest. The Willy wagtails seem to have stopped breeding. One year they had four batches of young but Dad decided they ought to all leave home and started attacking the youngster which wouldn't leave.I think in the end it died sadly.

We have finished carting the wood Anton cut up for us from that half a tree that came down in the ferocious winds last week. It looks a respectable heap and will dry out in the sun ready for next winter. It is all stacked by the chook yard.
I miss my chooks but won't get any more till I have a better chookshed as the present one is too hard to keep clean and isn't very hygienic.
Perhaps it can be a project when everything else has been caught up with......

Adelaide Surprises

We drove into North Adelaide this morning for Brian to see his eye specialist for a six monthly check up for the pressures in his eyes.We couldn't park in the Specialists car park and finished up as usual in the next street. There is a lane which goes between the houses and goes through to Melbourne street. I usually wander off to look at buildings when Brian goes in to have his tests which can take well over an hour or even two. Once or twice have finished up in St Peter's Cathedral which I admire very much. This time though I went across the parklands and found all sorts of treasures and interesting things to look at.
I found this rather poignant memorial to a young man who lost his life so needlessly. You wonder what went wrong , did he use a more modern gun powder instead of black powder?
Did he perhaps not put in enough gun powder or too much?It reminded me of a headstone in the Penwortham Cemetery which had a stone saying the young man died due to a melancholy accident.

From the Naval Memorial garden I could see the spires of St Peter's Cathedral with the Jackaranda tree in the foreground.
The Jackaranda trees all over Adelaide were flowering prolifically and looking just beautiful.
It was a stunning day today weather wise and the park lands are still green. It may have been the Adelaide University cricket grounds I saw where quite a few birds were having a wonderful time under the sprinklers and a man was busy mowing. I wandered over to see the interesting grandstand and took a photo of it.Brian tells me he played hockey on some of the playing fields there when he was a young man and was knocked unconscious by a hockey ball during one game. I was amazed at the huge grounds there are there, we are so lucky that Light made sure Adelaide was surrounded by parklands.

I found the George Fife Angas Memorial and was somewhat nonplussed by the Black Angel holding a palmfrond.
When I looked up the Statues of Adelaide on the web, it had a very good rundown on this memorial. It appears there was quite a controversy about the proposed memorial because the Workers Union didn't think Angas was such a fantastic employer and had not paid his workers all that well....
Well, what was new, most of the pastoralists worked their employees hard and paid as little as they could get away with in those days.
If you want to know more about these statues you can look them up on the net.Someone had stated that they thought the Black Angel, well, they said dark woman with feathers....
was incongruous to the overall memorial and so it seems to me also.

Just to the west of the Angas memorial is the bronze created by Robert Hannaford of
Simpson and his Donkey of Gallipoli and WW1
fame. It is fronted by a large bed of white and red petunias which is very effective.
I read Hannaford as being quoted that bronzes will outlast anything else on the planet, art wise that is, paintings and other works of art would be utterly destroyed by some  world disaster.....
It is a stunning piece of art and how lucky we are to have such artists in South Australia.

Walking further along to the Torrens bridge and down the bike path along the river, which, by the way was looking full and quite good, I was met by numerous girls on bikes in large groups.
All exams must be finished as they all greeted me cheerily as they rode past. Were they all wearing orange for the 25th November ? or was  my re-call faulty, perhaps it was red they were all wearing, whatever... they were a happy lot.
Looking back along the path I could see the bridge with the looming flying saucers above it which of course is our new construction for the Adelaide oval...we must move with the times....

The city council has certainly landscaped all along the river Torrens and it was all looking just gorgeous. The agapanthus were flowering and with the roses looked wonderful against the bridge near the Adelaide Zoo. There were a lot of people either walking or biking along all the paths with others just sitting on the grass in the shade of trees. How different life is here in this peaceful city to so many other cities overseas in turmoil and savagery amongst their own citizens.

I had been walking past various fibre art pieces placed at intervals along the river. One was a long felted piece running from the top bank to the river with a hole in it to allow for a tree.
So I photographed this crayon art piece running up the steps to the path which eventually took me back to the University playing fields.
I love stone walls and steps that may or may not, lead to some other interesting place...
By the time I got back to the street where we were parked it took me quite some time to find the lane leading to Melbourne street and the specialists rooms to wait for Brian.
Only a little wait while I read some ancient magazine ( why do waiting rooms always have such old magazines? you'd think the fees they charge they could run to more up to date stuff ?) Brian got a good report and needs to come back in six months time.....

Storm Damage in the Garden

Last night we had the most horrendously strong winds, they lasted all night , roared and twisted and were still blowing when I got up this morning. When my sister rang me at 7 am it was calm in Adelaide but it was still blowing strongly here.
When I went out to put some stuff in the recycle bin , I noticed half a tree had been twisted off the main trunk and fallen across our track, onto the bottle brush tree which was flattened as a result.Luckily we were still able to use the other part of the drive to get out.

What to do when our chainsaw would have been too small to cope with this huge limb.
Our share farmer would be too busy at this haymaking time to call on and the Home Assist people don't do chainsawing.
I decided to contact our friend who used to do gardening for us but is now busy building rammed earth houses with a local firm. I thought perhaps he may know of a local or have a friend who would tackle this huge limb.

So I texted him ( oh, the joy of mobile phones...)
and he replied that he was actually off work for a few days, waiting for the next house to be built in a fortnights time. He was willing to come around and cut up the tree; what a relief to have him come around and have a coffee first  with my musical friends who had also just arrived.
He was telling us over coffee how he fishes for sand whiting at Aldinga reef and uses the live bait of tiny crustacians he pumps out of the sand first.

After coffee we left him to it and we went into the studio to play our Teleman and Bach pieces to the background music of the chainsaw....We thought we might tackle a new piece of music next time, we hadn't played together since late September.
He did a great job and as the photos below show, we will have a good start for our next winter fire wood.

It has left a very bare patch in that corner now and I am wondering what to plant now as the Agonis didn't like it there and died and really the bottle brush had been struggling too.
I would love to plant a Holm Oak but they take so long to grow....
Perhaps it may be better to plant the Winpara Gem Grevillia, they do seem to do well here once you get them going.
I have carted three barrow loads of the smaller pieces and stacked them near the fowl yard where they will get plenty of sun and wind to dry them out ready for the winter fires. Only it has hardly dented the number still to be carted....

The poor tree has this great gaping wound now but I hope it will
not worry it too much and it will heal itself.
I noticed the vineyard row next to the fence and the trees are not doing too well. The neighbours did cut a trench and lined it with plastic but I think gumtrees exude a kind of deterrent to discourage other plants from invading their territory.

There is still a bit more to be sawed up but his chainsaw was blunt at this stage and he needed to go home to sharpen it. He will come back tomorrow and do some other garden jobs for us before he goes on a bit of a holiday and then back to work.
We will continue to cart wood for the next few days ....and prune back the roses which have flowered prolifically this season and pull more weeds and strike cuttings .....the list goes on, never a dull moment

Return of the Tawny Frogmouths & other Hatchlings

What a surprise yesterday morning to look out and see the Tawny Frogmouths had again taken up residence in our patio vine since it grew its spring foliage . I had seen them in the pepper tree last week under which we have the bales of hay for mulch and where we go quite frequently. They looked somewhat surprised too, I think, as of course we use that door onto the patio a lot. In and out most of the day to do gardening which is naturally in full swing now with mulching and watering as well.The photo on the left taken from the position of the door shows the birds looking surprised and the next photo taken from outside the vine shows they are telling us " we are not here".

I love the way they stick their beaks up in the air pretending we can't see them.
As there are only two, I am not sure if these are the parents or a parent and a young one. Remember the young one fledged onto the rotary hoist end of September ?
They were not here this morning so I guess they felt they would get a better day's rest back in the pepper tree.

The other bird which nested in the vine was a Greeny, or the White-plumed honey eater. It is a beautifully woven nest of grasses and tied to the vine branches. While it was sitting on eggs it seemed to cope alright with the traffic going on underneath it. When we had family to stay so there were more people, the birds would come in to feed the young via a different route and where they thought we couldn't see them.

The photo on the right shows the Willy wagtail nest with its young in the Ash tree.They only hatched two this time. The parents have been very busy feeding them so a lot of insects have been eliminated .Some one remarked today that they think the Blackbirds have actually slotted into the ground insect control area as not many native birds fulfill that niche.

The photo on the left you will have to click on and hopefully see the Greeny chick in its nest. If not you can treat it as a "Spot the Bird" game.
The chicks fledged and that was it, they have disappeared never to return home!

I got some nice shots of the Bronze wing pigeon at the pond the other day.It is being kept company by a Blackbird sitting on the jug. Do click on the photo as the colours on the wings are just lovely. It sits and "Booms" away in the mornings and I have been wondering if it is nesting in the pale blue eremophila just up the lane between the trees.