I have the usual sort of entertainment at Possum Valley, TV, radio, internet, books and in my case ‘The Times’ cryptic crossword is an enduring addiction, but a more subtle source of entertainment is the environment. It changes the programme throughout the year. Just recently has been the the time for the sarsaparilla trees to bloom. I don’t know if this season has been more prolific than most for flowers, or I have just taken the time to look, but it seems the trees were laden with yellow flowers that bent some branches to breaking point when showers added some extra weight. At the same time, the hairy-leafed bolly gum, another prolific tree, put out its new leaves. The young leaves are pinkish when small and turn to a light green in a couple of weeks. They hang limply down for the first couple of months as if dying of thirst, and as the name suggests , when new they are hairy.
Another recent event in the yearly cycle has been the recent swarming of the allete (spelling is wrong, and spellcheck can’t help) termites. These are the fertile kings and queens that leave the nest on hot still days to look for a mate and found a colony. They are natures victims and less than 1 in a million are succesful and survive getting gobbled up by predators. For a few hot afternoons of the years they appear in vast numbers flying clumsily with wings that fall off after a couple of hours. I was collecting the washing yesterday and furiously trying to shake them off the sheets and they dislodge easily, but another flurry appears in seconds to take their place. They were landing all over me, shedding their wings and in my hair, down my shirt dong no harm but tickling. They don’t bite, in fact I think they can’t bite even well enough to feed themselves. They are in a desperate race to breed the sterile workers that can then feed them. The birds have a field day with these slow, fatty and helpless creatures. The small flycatcher birds line up on my roof and elegantly pluck them from the sky. The larger birds assemble on the roof and peck them up, as there is no place to hide on a tin roof. Sometimes sounds like a team of riveters are working up there. I noticed a couple of currawongs systematically working the gutters as I guess the inept crawling of the termites concentrated them there.
Other entertainment I have witnessed over the years is many inter-species interactions. Growing up in the UK, I had imagined that species did their own thing without bothering much with other species. That may be true where I was raised as there is a only a tiny fraction of number of species that can be found in Oz. That may have something to do with the fact that where I lived in the north of England, just 11,000 years ago it was under a 2km thick slab of ice that scraped away mountains. Nothing like that for sterilizing the place.
There is much inter-species action in a rainforest. Some is quite understandable with species that compete for similar food resources such as Lewin’s and bridled honey-eaters. They quite often have turf wars. The Lewin’s are slightly more robust and will see of a lone bridled, but the bridled gang up and the Lewin’s do not, and then the tables are turned. I was once treated to a war between about 50? currawongs and about the same number of crimson rosellas. The crow family and the parrot family have very loud harsh calls. A very noisy event with many insults traded. After watching for about half an hour, I left them too it, still battling it out.
Just outside my bedroom window is the clothes line where a young male rifle bird, still in female plumage was dancing his jig with his wings forming a perfect umbrella …. but to 2 birds of another species, little finches I think. I was fascinated by the the effort and precision of his dance as were the little birds. They stayed 5 or 10 minutes, and when you consider the attention span of a bird, that is a concert performance.
Yesterday I dumped the kitchen scraps in the garden just outside the kitchen. In a very short time one of my ducks showed up, a red-legged paddymelon (small kangaroo), and a scrub turkey. And who took charge? My duck. The paddymelon was bigger, the scrub turkey was quicker, but the duck was more belligerent. Think Donald Duck if your memory is long enough. I attempted to take a picture of the inter-play as they all tried to get a piece of the action, but all it revealed was that I ought to clean my windows more often. The flash went off, capturing my neglect.
Other events for entertainment are coming up. The firefly season, the beetle season, the moth season, the cicada season, the bower-bird season, the wet season, the dry.
Now more than 50% of the worlds population lives in cities where seasons have been eliminated. Quite out of touch with system which provides all their needs. Heating or air-conditioning can negate the inconvenience of temperature fluctuations. Nature has been fenced out by concrete and steel. And people’s comfort zone has been shrunk to a few percent of the ideal. Actually people can and do survive and thrive in a huge variety of environments, but the pampered western countries expect the environment to conform to them.
The environment will have the last word as physics cannot be legislated away.
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