The House(s) of Fran_mart

I'm sure you are all up to speed on Quidditch being the game of choice at Hogwarts.  It has in fact become a muggle sport also, with a few modifications for the lack of levitation on the broomsticks.  The ANU team - The Owls - had a recruiting drive today and, as one of our young friends is a player in the team -  Frances and I rocked along to watch. It was good to see that a bunch of the players had chosen a carbon - neutral means of getting to the game. Which leads to the thought of when is bicycle Quidditch going to be invented?  The death toll could be huge! There had been quite a bit of activity on Facebook including this page , still being composed 5 minutes before the game started.  I like the idea of using a tee-shirt to shade the screen. The game is taken seriously with people warming up! Numbers are free choice so both pi and infinity have been used.  I reckon it was miserable to not allow one player to use 'i' as his number on the ...

After about 6 weeks of hot weather today has seen a dramatic drop in temperature occasioned by a Southerly change with lots of clouds.  Now, clouds are what generate spectacular sunsets and there was a pretty good specimen thereof tonight. The first few images are looking west, towards Taliesin.  By the time I got out there, things to the East were pretty much shutting down, but these 2 images looking North (towards Kowen and JOC) have some appeal to me.

I have posted many times about the Tawny Frogmouths that roost and nest in our yard.   Today they have returned to the yard. This follows their traditional Summer vacation touring elsewhere in their territory. The difference between their vacations and human vacations is that they don't bring the kids back! I always get a bit fraught around this time of year wondering if they will return. Of course it is difficult to tell if it is the same pair as they aren't banded. However the behaviour is so similar that I am happy to say at least one of them must be the same. I last encountered them on 30 December 2016 when they returned briefly from their travels. They left a little earlier than usual, possibly due to the presence of a family (I think) of Collared Sparrowhawks that moved into the area, Certainly the accipiters have gone quiet over the last couple of days. I didn't find them at all in January (situation normal) and they are usually around on 20 -60% of ...

The temperature in Canberra on 9 January got to 37 o C.  Despite that I manged to list 31 species of birds at the Jerrabomberra Wetlands between about 1400 and 1530. My target (with Bird-a-day in mind) was a Little Egret that had been reported from Kelley's Swamp.  I had visited the Crust Bakery on my way to the swamp and it was a great pleasure to see the Little Egret over the top of an excellent Steak and Kidney pie rated 8.5 on the official pie rating scale . Here is the first image from Ardea Hide.  The dark bill is quite visible. Somewhat later I got some closer shots from the new Snipe hide. In common with quite a few of the birds seen today it seemed to be almost panting in the heat.  I empathised with it. From Cygnus hide a fair number (at least 7) Latham's Snipe were visible in the grass on the far side of the Swamp. A team of Little Pied Cormants were doing their panting and preening on a dead tree. I wandered over the Creek to Fulica ...

This morning there was a loud squeak down our hall.  We had been invaded by a large and frisky Peron's Tree Frog.  The next image has zoomed in on the eye, just about revealing the cross shape which is diagnostic of the species. Mr Frog was captured with a butterfly net, which has so far proved easier to use catching vertebrates (a Long-eared Bat as well as the frog) than butterflies, and reinserted onto the wide brown land. An update is that 2 days later another one was captured in our bedroom.  Again put outside.  It is intriguing how the little sods are getting in.  In this second case it explains a clicking noise I heard during the night, which I had thought was the small dog walking around wanting to go out for a toilet break - but she was still soundly asleep in her bed.   Somewhat later that day Frances drew my attention to a Jacky Lizard hitting its head against the lounge window.  It was either: trying to get in the house and ou...

We have recently had some very warm nights, including the warmest recorded in our home location.  However this wasn't reflected in the daily minimum temperatures.  This appeared to be because the temperature dropped later in the day and my weather station records on the basis of a "calendar day".  The issue is shown by this graph. The early morning of 24 January was very warm, with a recorded minimum of 21.1 o C at 3am, marked with a red star.  However the next evening was a lot cooler and by  11pm had dropped to 17 o C.  As indicated above my "calendar day" approach records the day's minimum as 17 o C. Cutting to the chase, I have concluded that for the purposes of recording the weather over a longer term it is not worth the extra effort to recalculate minima based on a different time of starting a day.  Where a different purpose is in mind - eg assessing the comfort levels over a shorter period such as a month - a specific analysis could well be...

While heading across the Plain this morning I noticed a birder peering into a scope so stopped to enquire what he was looking at. That was a Brown Falcon, but he said he'd had 2 possible Australasian Bitterns fly out of a hawthorn across a paddock and land some distance away in a creek line.  My pulse rate eventually dropped to about 180. After quickly contacting the landholder we set off to look for the birds where he thought they'd landed.   A first bizarre sight was a White-necked Heron perched on some power lines. Another bird of the same species nearly joined it, but couldn't work out the balance and landed in the creek. A White-faced Heron had avoided the wires and perched on the power pole. We were looking in the creek and its vegetation for the possible Bitterns but suddenly noticed  two large brown lumbering heron-like things were flying across the paddock.  We had passed them and they flushed behind us. At least one landed in the Molonglo o...