When I am filling the kettle to make the morning coffee I usually happen to glance out the kitchen window just to see what wonders the day has in store for me. There are always some, a number of which you have been a party to over the years, such as this secretive rabbit which I made a feature of in an item about Responsible Sambar Deer Hunting .
This morning there was a wonderfully fat pair of satin bower birds – frequent visitors to our garden.
We have lived on this small farm for over thirty years and so have this pair of blue cranes which every year nest in one of the old blue gums which I passed this morning when giving the ewes a new paddock.
Once more they are building one of their exiguous nests from which they almost always manage to raise one or two gangly croaking chicks. The wood ducks are nesting in the same tree, as they do every year too.
These old gums are probably pre-settlement relics as they would have a job surviving cattle if they come up in the paddocks. However they are very quick-growing. I have some just as large which I know I planted myself, but will not do so again as the changes to native vegetation on private land mean that you no longer own the native trees.
This one is being ‘parasitised’ by what looks like a Moreton Bay Fig which I also planted thirty years ago. It is growing in a hole in the tree in which the kookaburras often nest probably thirty feet up. I feel a bit sorry for its being up there but as I dare not climb up to rescue it it will just have to struggle on until the old host tree finally falls when someone can transplant it – or it may even take root by itself – who knows? There may not even be people on the planet when that eventually happens.
Because we continue to plant trees and other things we are visited by a delightful variety of wildlife. Last night for example, there was a ring-tailed possum on the new archway just outside the front door. Honey drew my attention to it. I was going to take a photo of it but it was just too cold n my bare feet.
This morning as well as the bower birds there was a pair of crimson rosellas, a small flock of fairy wrens, another of fire-tailed finches, a pair of thorn-bills, the ubiquitous sparrows and blackbirds, a solitary fantail…all this delight just within twenty feet of our window and at the same time as I happened to glance up from my chore.
We think we live here but we are just passing through. They really they live here – and will long after we are gone, which will not be that much longer now anyway, a decade perhaps.
