Spring things - mainly

I have been a bit busy on things other than blogging the last few days so here are a few bits and pieces from today.  The starting point was probably going  outside to check on the Cyanicula caerulens situation which resolved in the negative (it is still a few days early).

On the way to discover this, I caught up with a few flowers around the garden I missed earlier in the week.  Beginning with some Hellebores growing beside the deck.
 Then a mixed bunch of snowdrops and jonquils.
 Some white jonquils.
Frances picked a bunch of these for in the house but their perfume was so strong they got exported outside again!

Heading up the block I noticed quite a large bush of Acacia gunnii.  This is an understated wattle in comparison with most of the others around here.
Of the mauve beans around the block I have had trouble finding much Hardenbergia for the last few years.  No idea what has happened to it.  The common one today was Glycine australis. - oops, no, Hovea heterophylla.
 Back at the ranch the Tawny Frogmouths are rebuilding the nest in the same spot as last year.  They have about 10 days more construction- probably 8 more carting material and then two nights of compressing it.
 The Pied Currawongs are unfortunately also rebuilding.  The red line marks the boundary between last years nest and the additions.
 I wonder if the Scarlet Robins are thinking of nesting here this year.  Whatever it is nice to see the male   ...
 .. and the female in our Pistachio tree.
 As we went out towards Queanbeyan we saw an Echidna walk across the road.  It was probably thinking about mating, as well as wondering where the next termite mound was to be found.
 Many of the above were about breeding - the last image isn't: I think.
My objective was to go and get a hair cut.  There was a bit of a wait  and then another guy came in with his Short-haired Pointer.  It was a lovely dog and I was patting its head when the next thing I knew it joined me on the lounge!  Only in Queanbeyan.

A small dog investigated my trousers very closely when I got home.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Insects from pine trees

Image
This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I rec...
Read more

A tour of the West (part 1)

Image
A friend from my time in the UN sent me some photos of her family trip along Route 66.  They did this is a large camperwagon rather than a Chevy Corvette (apparently the kids jacked up about being offered a trip in the trunk).  It seems to have been a very good trip for them and most interesting to see their photos.  It was also educational for me, as I found out the German for rocking chair (schaukelstuhl, since you ask). They did 7200 miles in 30 days - a pretty serious bit of distance. This made me think of the trips we did in 1981 when living in Denver.  Frances initiated that idea by getting a book about the National Parks of the West  and marking interesting places.  I then worked out a route on a Rand-McNally Road Atlas (GPS was unknown then  - as were iPhones, personal computers and the internet).  From memory, taking nearly the whole Summer school holidays we covered about 10,000 miles in 70 days.  Here, approximately,  are ...
Read more

Maslins beach rules

Image
Anyone who was in Adelaide in the 1970s will be having a good nudge nudge at that title.  However the beach is really nice even though it is the haunt (in Summer ) of naked people.  (As an aside one of the 'van park staff was talking to some other guests and commented that the sights on the beach in Summer were not at all exciting.)  In April it is the haunt of seniors, many of them exercising their dogs, and thus a far more attractive place. Getting to the beach was a walk of about 1km along roads, from our van.  The second half of this went past a rather daggy looking paddock with many formed ridges in it, as though it was irrigated, although a water sources wasn't evident.  The paddock got interesting towards the end as some green parrots appeared.  Thanks to Frances eye for detail we have subsequently identified these as Elegant Parrots: my first lifer for 2014.    The locale is indicated by the red lines in this mudmap: Here are the bird...
Read more