Autumn Rain to Save our Bacon....

 At last, after the driest spell on record, we have autumn rain....the West terrace weather station in Adelaide South Australia started recording in 1839, it goes to show how hot and dry this summer has been. So it has been such a relief to see rain in good measure blessing the barren soil and giving the trees and plants at last a good, long, drink. There is absolutely nothing like rain for plants to respond, as one can water all one likes, only rain makes the plant world smile...
the clouds above the Willunga hills seen across our paddock are a wonder to behold.

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As I was checking for damage to the trees after the fierce winds which also accompanied some of the rainy days, I found this Lehmanii flower on the ground and brought it in to photograph it.
It is an amazing structure, about 12cm across and 8cm high.It is covered in stamens and in amongst them are the bigger female ones which will turn into these wonderful red tubes, like finger stalls.
These then drop off and leave a solid wooden sphere which make wonderful fire wood and leave hot coals for a long time. While eating breakfast I could see a tiny insect running up and down the spikes having a great time....
 Again, looking at the trees, there were lots of red flowering blue gum blossems  on the ground in one place.
Looking closer there were tiny seedlings sprouting amongst the leaf and bark litter. Probably all weeds of course, but at this stage I am very happy to see green things after all the brown we have seen for months on end.

Next to the Blue gum is a pink gum which has white flowers, sadly I couldn't see any bees but it was early in the morning and the bees were having a sleep-in perhaps? after all the rain and the sudden cold as well they may have been reluctant to leave their warm hive...
These trees were all planted 28 years ago when we first came to live here and the block was practically bare. We now live in a very healthy little forest and have plenty of small wood for the fire....

We seem to have a sudden influx of Wattle birds.
The Noisy Miners left a little while ago and I think the Wattle birds feel safer now. They are amusing to watch as they are like a mob of school boys let out for the afternoon and having great fun in the local swimming hole by swinging off branches into the water diving under and out the other side to land on the fig tree or in this case the little statue sitting on the edge of the pond.

The dead BIFCUS on the right was in the front garden last week and we could not find out why it had died. BIFCUS stands for Black Faced Cuckoo Shrike and is a nomadic bird which does visit us occasionally. It makes a lovely soft churring sound and is quite unobtrusive. It lives on insects but will also eat berries and fruit and may occasionally eat little birds' nestlings...
I gave it a decent burial under the walnut tree....

Garden in drought and a visiting Tortoise

 We  had an extremely dry summer which has continued into autumn this year. It has been a real battle to keep plants going with a minimum amount of water. On the left you can see the bark and gum leaf litter which looks like the Australian bush but is actually part of our wild garden. It has even beaten the Blackbirds which normally love to scratch and carry on, they have moved into the vineyard next door which of course is irrigated and lends itself to scratching around in damper soil.

 Large sheets of bark have been shed by the eucalyptus trees which in a way is quite useful for us as we gather it into the shed ready for lighting our winter fires. Some of the colours are so beautiful, soft greys and subtle reds you feel you would like to do something creative with them, but hey, there is only so much time in the day....A lot of the smaller bark is left behind as it is good cover for insects and little skinks which love to hide under it and sometimes gives you quite a start as they suddenly appear and hurry off to somewhere else....

 Despite the extreme drought, we have bulbs suddenly appearing, first the Bella Donna or naked ladies lilies and then the very tall Candelabra lilies. This year though, the individual flowers of the lily are not as big or robust as other years when we have had some summer rains.
It never ceases to amaze me, to see them appear one morning without any fanfare, looking stunningly beautiful...
"Consider the lilies of the field" springs to mind...
The other flower which is a vivid red with golden stamens are the Blood lilies, these hug the ground on short stems and are very much loved by the New Holland honey eaters which descend on them in the late afternoon in sight of the verandah while we are having our end of the day drink....they are fun to watch as they also splash about in the birdbath and get the Willy wagtails all annoyed as they think it is their private bar and chase them off. Then Wattle birds may come and have a drink, imagine drinking someone else's bath water.....

 The wood heap on the right will help to keep us warm for a little while this coming winter.
Some of that wood was brought in for us from another garden which was glad to get rid of it.
It breaks my heart though, as the colour is a beautiful deep red in some of that wood and would polish into something lovely
If only I was a wood worker....

 Now this morning early, the birds were kicking up hell's delight and I wondered if the Koala had returned. I couldn't see anything in the trees at all but when I walked out to have a closer look and see what all the noise was about , there was a Tortoise all tucked in on itself when I got there.
Quickly got my camera but all you can see are his little claws and he was Not going to stick his neck out for me no matter how long I waited...

I turned him (was it a him?) upside down and we can see his lovely patterned underside....
The pointy end is his rear and the blunt end where he hides his head. He is the long necked native tortoise and wanders about a bit, he was probably heading for the ponds further up the road...
I turned him the right way up and a little later saw him walking away
The birds meanwhile got on with gathering their breakfasts ...we would be knee deep in insects if it wasn't for them....earwigs...pillbugs...millepedes....

....New birds in Tineke's Garden

It has been very hot here for the last few days and today it is 40*C outside. So we have been a bit worried about the second family Mr&Mrs  Willy Wagtail have hatched since the new year. There are only three of them because we wondered if a Tawny Frogmouth might have kidnapped one because they were sitting in the  the patio vines too for a couple of days....
The little babies decided they could leave the nest but they finished up on the patio bricks, still unable to fly at this stage. Mum and Dad are still busily feeding them and we can watch them through our sitting room glass door while having a cup of tea.

You can see how little they are sitting on the patio bricks. I have put water there for them but it is only the parents that seem to drink.
What has really surprised us is that suddenly there are three,great ,big, (compared to the little baby birds above) Grey Currawongs hanging around the bird bath, keeping all the other little birds away from the water. This is at the front of our house. Grey Currawongs usually live in scrub country, like the Mallee or the Adelaide hills and are awful nest robbers....They look black but they must be the Grey Currawongs as Black ones live only on the East coast of Australia.

The only redeeming feature is their melodious call which can reverberate over the countryside.
They mostly live on insects they find in the forest litter and they also pull bark off the gumtrees to find insects there. And as I said before they will rob the nests of other birds in the Springtime when all the birds are busy hatching baby birds....
Their size is 500mm (which is 50cm to my mind) so you can see by using a ruler how long they are. They seem to have very savage looking beaks.....don't they...

Now, a kinder but also noisy bird is the Rainbow Lorikeet, this one is sitting on its own for the moment but soon a dozen or more will arrive and they squeak and squawk and push each other around in the water, if there is any left that is...
They live mostly in the top of trees on the eucalyptus flowers and their noise can be quite deafening.....

This pair of Kangaroos were in the garden earlier last year in the winter time when our garden is green instead of brown like it is in the summer.
The sun burns everything off in our hot summer and I always think the plants respond to the heat like your plants in the Northern hemisphere respond to the snow and ice... by going under ground and waiting for kinder weather.... Don't forget to click on the photos to get a closer look at the birds and kangaroos.....

Wild Energy and Excitement on the Pond....

 What a wonderful surprise this morning when Brian called out from the kitchen that there were ducklings on the pond....and sure enough, there they were, the black ducks with a half a dozen ducklings swimming about busily feeding in among the water lilies. I ran to get my camera at once and took a host of photos because in all the years we have observed the ducks mating on the pond, we have never seen where they nest or if they ever did have ducklings. So here they were busily dashing about in the rocks and swimming amongst the waterlilies.

Here is a puzzle though, Father Duck is a Mallard with his handsome green head and colourful body markings. Has the male black duck changed plumage or is it an entirely different male duck and if he is,where did he come from? He mostly stood guard on the bank but in the end he did come into the water.
I have never seen so much energy as in these ducklings... they were in the water...out the water ...round the fish fountain..back with Mum...scrambling up the rocks ...following each other with amazing speed.... 

 Mum decided this was enough and waddled away and one of the ducklings was left behind getting confused as to which rock to climb on to get out.... she promptly returned and he found a way out...
They were last seen heading west and we assume they probably came from the "wetlands" which are about three hundred meters west, up our road. A long way for tiny little webbed feet to have to go.....

 Our weather pattern is completely changed.
We have had 37 degree days Monday week ago and then a change roared in and we had a savage hailstorm the following Wednesday, the front garden was completely covered with hail as you can see in the photo on the right if you click on it.
I don't know how that has affected the vineyards around here but you wonder about the grapes. I know the fruit growers in the Adelaide hills had very badly damaged young apples, pears and cherries.

After the storm finished I went looking for the Tawny Frogmouths and found them huddled together in the Ashtree protecting their young chick. Did you know that Australia is the only country that has this particular Frogmouth?
The CSIRO have published a fascinating book of studies done on the Frogmouth , some very interesting information about these very special Zen Birds....
Wished I could sit as still and unperturbed in this mad human world as they can....

Feathered Offsprings Fully Fledged

It is truly amazing how quickly the Willy Wagtail chicks grew. I think they were hatched in about ten days and then it was a very busy time for the parent birds to feed four perpetually hungry offsprings...both parents flew in and out all day and every day and I must say we didn't have a mosquito annoying us at all while having our evening drink on the patio.
The chicks started to fill out the nest very quickly and it wasn't long before they were sitting on the vine branches to get more room for exercising their wing muscles....

In the photo on the right they are sitting away from the nest after only a week....they still sit and squeak all day ravenous for food.
Two days after this photo they had flown to the front of the house and were sitting in the Holm oak tree where they are still roosting at night. They have flown down to the fishbowl now and the parents are still giving them food.It will be interesting to see when they have to start foraging for themselves......it is a hot North wind today so all the birdbaths are well patronized

The photo on the left shows a young Blue tongue lizard which I found in our laundry. It was trying to hide itself so I was able to pick it up as it was in a corner and couldn't get away.
It would have crawled under the fly screen door which has a gap down below and doesn't fit flush with the doorstep. They are surprisingly strong and it took me quite a bit of gentle pressure to hold him, it was not amused...I let it go by the Studio wall as its mother lives there and I can hear her scuttling away if I come upon her unexpectedly.

We also had a Koala again that same day but I was not able to photograph him, I think it was a male as he was rather grumpy and growled a lot.
The other thing I am pleased about is that the Hippeastrum bulbs which have been sitting in this pot for about three or more years, have finally starting to show flowers which are spectacular.....I had thought of giving up on them but apparently they like to be crowded in a pot before they will flower and it took them all that time to feel comfortably crowded  ...
So patience does pay, bless my mother for always telling me that when I was young...

Spring and Feathered Offsprings....

 It has been an anxious time waiting for the Tawney Frogmouth chick to appear..... he started sitting on September the 17th which is seven weeks ago and I was starting to despair of ever seeing and offspring, wondering if he was sitting on dud eggs.But at last yesterday I saw  there is a chick sitting in front of his Dad... Mum is on a branch nearby, so all is well.
What a relief ,as you wonder if we are upsetting nature so much now with the vineyards spraying incessantly for downy mildew at present with this strange weather we are having.

 Meanwhile the Willy Wagtails have hatched about four little chicks on the patio vine under cover...we were worried they might expire when we had a sudden burst of very hot weather last week but they survived. Then they also survived the most ferocious thunderstorms we had three nights ago when large hailstones pelted down on the roof, as of course they are well and truly sheltered from those stones with a solid roof over their nest.
The magpies too, have hatched a baby as we can hear it singing out but the nest is too high to make a decent photograph of it.

The other pleasing thing is that the one remaining old chook, which I have been too soft to dispatch for chicken soup and still buying layer pellets for, has suddenly starting to lay eggs....
she is producing one a day...how good is that ...
my patience has been rewarded
now I wonder if I should get her some companions but on the other hand she may be quite happy on her own with nothing to bother her...

 I took a photo of Wombat, one of the quirky pottery animals made by a Yankalilla potter some years ago, as it is looking rather splendid with a fuchsia  I bought at Aldi a while ago.It looked pretty dreadful at the time and felt stupid afterwards for having bought it. It took a long time to right itself as I realized I was drowning it with kindness and it really wanted to be left alone.
Since then it has recovered to the extend where I think I shall have to find a larger pot or even split it up.

The strap cactus is flowering madly as well in front of the Studio.
In fact the whole garden is looking brilliant at present after the good thunderstorm rains we had, nothing like rain to spur plants on....

Spring and the Willy Wagtail nest building

"Spring has sprung and the grass has rizz
I wonder where the birdies is..."
Omar Khayyam said " the Bird is on the wing" but isn't the wing on the bird?...
Our pond has attracted a variety of birds this spring. We had the Black duck pair amusing themselves while the White-faced Heron stood calmly by. Yesterday three black duck flew in and it was a bit like a gang rape, as the female was being mounted by two males and nearly drowning in the process.....a bit of a worry that..

Our resident Willy Wagtail couple have been busy constructing their nest for the past fortnight or so.They both came onto the patio vine and decided where a good branch might be. After testing a few areas first ,they decided that the branch nearly above our Weber would be a good place. I have told them, we live here also and they will have to put up with me cooking out there at times.....they don't mind at all it appears....
Their nest is a marvel of construction. It seems they glue the first layer down and then proceed to bring in suitable materials like fine twigs

 and grasses. Then they hunt out the spiderwebs and use them to strengthen the whole structure.
By this time they look for lining materials and I put out some combed wool fibers which they duly picked up and used.
If you click on the left photo you can see the male smoothing down the outside of the nest.
Now I guess it will be egg laying time and while she sits, he sings her songs all night long....
so sweet....

The photo on the right shows a pair of Wood duck which flew in a couple of weeks ago.
They of course, make their nest in the large Gum tree by the gate, high up and well out of reach of
predators. When the ducklings have hatched and big enough, they have to fall out of the tree onto the ground well below and you wonder how they survive this, bouncing quite lightly perhaps...
Funnily, the White face heron also has a nest in the same huge, Sugar gum but I think they only have about one chick whereas the Wood duck seem to have a dozen or more. They are actually not ducks but Maned Geese....
Meanwhile we have been driven mad with five hundred or more shrieking Corellas....it drives one to thoughts of Murder......