Mare Atlanticus.....

My next project has been inspired by Simon Winchester's book" Antlantic". He tackled a huge subject and must have done amazing amounts of research for this.
I enjoy his personable style of writing, none of this "my writing is as a result of Creative Writing courses I have attended".
The book is full of interesting words and interesting ideas and wonderful asides...

It is inspirational to read about, to me, obscure scientific research...Dr Penny Chisholme and her
research colleague Rob Olsen discovered a tiny,oval- shaped living entity in the Sargasso sea which they named Prochlorococcus. There are trillions and trillions of these and they were found to  convert carbon dioxide into oxygen. They only live in the warm parts of the Atlantic and drift along to be eaten by the tiny shrimp which are eaten by something bigger and so on, the trouble when you are the bottom of the food chain....

 The signatures I created relate to the amazing large creatures that swim about in the Atlantic and the history of the intrepid seafaring ancient peoples
who dared to set forth in their fragile crafts to explore and find new treasures on far away coasts.
The Vikings were an intrepid but marauding lot of men who lived in the northern parts of Europe and  visited most countries within the reach of their longships. They raped and pillaged most of the northern European coastlines.

There is actually a connection with my very own family and the Vikings. The Dupuytren's syndrome is known as the Viking's disease and my oldest brother suffered with it. It contracts the sinews
of the hand and causes the fingers to start curling in. My grandmother came from Friesland which is close to Denmark from where the Vikings would launch forth on their raping and pillaging forays , so who knows what went on in the dim, distant past...... The other bit of historical information I gleaned, was the fact that the Dutch navy were the first to adopt a formation of lining their ships up in a naval battle and systematically firing their cannons into the Spanish navy and so defeated them.
Now for something entirely different......

The greenies, a honey eater , had made this beautiful nest in the Pandorea vine last month.
It is beautifully woven and one can only marvel at the architectural creativity at work here. It is lined with delicate little pink Galah feathers and soft grass. They have since built another nest in the patio vine and are busy hatching another lot of babies.

This season the Tawny Frogmouth has hatched two chicks. They do seem to take more than three weeks to hatch. Now though, they are getting quite big and if you click on this photo
you will get a better look at them
It is keeping so dry, we have not had any rain of consequence since August and we are having to water twice a week now
You soon forget how cold it was some weeks ago now we are already experiencing temperatures in the high thirties....