The Year starts

The year is only 10.75 hours old and we have already had some interesting moments.

We were awoken at 4:45 by a mob of raucous Laughing Kookaburra anticipating sunrise by about an hour. They surely are the bogans of the bird world. Various other species then decided (fortunately unsuccessfully) to compete for the Noisy Bird award,

By 5:30 I gave up trying to get back to sleep so went for a run.  In part this was a reflection of the promised 37 degrees which meant it would not be pleasant running later in the day.  As it was already 18 C and about 80%RH (a nice Winter's morning in Dar es Salaam) it wasn't too flash running that early.  But I got a run in.  We then went for our walk.

We slightly changed our route so that the worst of the grass seeds were avoided, particularly for the small dog.  This was fine until with about 200m to go she flashed to the side of the track and reappeared with a very live and very annoyed 1.1m brown snake in her mouth.  I jerked her away - I think she flew about 3m dropping the snake who reversed out of the way.  Clearly she had got in first and the snake not at all.  Hopefully the reptile wasn't too badly damaged.  This behaviour is hard wired into the small dog's genes and we are not going to be able to train her out of going for them. 

We then moved on to our next task which was completing our yellow tree 'sculpture'.    This is some dead branches from a tortured hazel tree (used as a roost by the female Tawny Frogmouth during the brooding season) which we scraped the bark off and then Frances painted bright yellow.  Here they are drying after the second coat.
I have included this image primarily because Frances thought they looked pretty spiffy so might do a second lot!  The main aim of this exercise was to 'fill a gap' in the view from her painting desk in the sun-room.
Under these light conditions the best view of the artefact is coming up the drive:

A few days later (8 January) I took a picture late in the afternoon which showed the tree well, from the sun-room window.

The second lot started to be created on 17 January 2001.

Comments

Denis Wilson said…
Hope the dog did in fact not get bitten.
Some dogs are just obsessed.
I went bushwalking with a friend and his Kelpie. Amazing dog. It flushed a small deer, Grey Kangaroo, Red-necked Wallaby and either two Hairs or one Hair twice.
Not very "environmental" but a good indication of how much more dogs find than we normally see.
In your dogs case, it happens to be snakes.
2 January 2011 at 08:24:00 GMT+11
Flabmeister said…
Thank you for the concern Denis. She is fine - this time. I was pretty certain she didn't get bitten, but Frances watched her closely for the next few minutes.

There are many occasions on which she goes into 'point' mode and has obviously got something eyed off and where we cannot see anything. This often happens when she is indoors looking out a window or glass door. If she happens to be sitting on a lap when visual contact is made it can be quite painful: even a 3.1Kg dog packs quite a punch (or kick) when accelerating from rest to terminal velocity in 1 second.
2 January 2011 at 11:12:00 GMT+11
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