Category: Australia
Silent Sunday
Wordless Wednesday
An Unusual Visitor
After dinner tonight, I let Forrest dog out for a run, and before too long she began barking. She barked, and barked, and barked, way down the back of the garden. And Forrest doesn’t bark for no reason. She may bark because she can’t find her ball and wants help finding it; and she’ll bark at the cats if they don’t want to play with her (which is usual!) and she’s a good watch-dog too, so will bark if someone knocks on the front door.
Forrest is Adam and Mary’s dog, but they had gone out for dinner tonight, so Ben, also thinking the amount of barking was rather excessive, took a torch down the back to see what the problem was. Ben worried that it could be a snake that had Forrest in such a tizzy!
The good news was that it wasn’t a snake. The not so good news was that Forrest had a poor, scared echidna baled up, under a tree!
Forrest didn’t harm the echidna at all, I hasten to add, and I’m sure all her ruckus was an attempt to get this new friend to play with her, but still….you hear stories…..
Sybil, my lovely blogging friend from Nova Scotia, told of an episode where Sooki, who looks very similar in appearance to our Forrest girl, baled up a porcupine, after which the photos of Sooki were not pretty! I had shown photos of Sooki to both Ben and Adam some time ago, complete with “quills” protruding from her face, and this was the first thought that Ben had tonight, as he remembered the Sooki incident.
Ben had a torch with him, and also his mobile phone, so armed with these two items, he managed a clear enough photo to show you the poor little chappy, trying to hide ~
I did a bit of a Google search and found some clearer photos, along with some information about these beautiful mammals, on the Australia Zoo website. Australia Zoo is only a couple of hours drive north of here, and the home of the Crocodile Hunter, the late Steve Irwin. Here is a link to the Short-Beaked Echidna page on the Australia Zoo website. I can only assume that our backyard visitor is a short-beaked echidna, as his “beak” was tightly tucked away from Forrest!
Another walk down the garden a short while later revealed no further sign of the Echidna, so we can only assume that he managed to find his way back out of the garden….based on the fact that he found his way in! Hopefully he has a good sense of direction.
Tomorrow when Forrest goes out into the garden, one of us will have to go with her, until we are satisfied that the Echidna has realised that ours isn’t going to be the quietest garden on the block to take up residence in.
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Visions of Winter in the Valley
The back of my house overlooks the Tweed Valley, and the floor of the valley is covered in acre upon acre of sugar cane fields. Sugar production is one of the major industries in the area, just as it has been for many years, and during the winter, when the cane is ready for harvesting, fires are lit in the scrubby undergrowth, making way for a clear harvest run for the heavy machinery.
Usually, we see the bright orange glow of the cane fires after night fall, when a strip of the valley can be seen first of all smoldering, slowly transforming into orange flames, and as the fire takes hold we often hear the crackling sounds in the stillness of the dark night. It’s a magical sight, and one which we never tire of seeing.
I’ve tried so often to take photos of the cane fires, but with the surrounding darkness of the night, rarely do the photos do justice to the sight we see. Recently however, I spotted a swirl of smoke in the valley, late in the afternoon, before nightfall. And it eventually developed into a doozy of a fire too!
As you can see in the final photo, at the peak of the blaze, the density of the smoke almost completely hid majestic Mount Warning, the extinct volcanic mountain, and overseer of the Tweed Valley.
I may complain ad-nauseum about the sweltering heat during the summer, but it is winter still, and all things considered, I do live in a beautiful part of Australia.
“Out on the patio we’d sit,
And the humidity we’d breathe,
We’d watch the lightning crack over canefields
Laugh and think, this is Australia.” ~ This is Australia, Gangajang.~~~~~~~~
In My World 