My Bright Field

One of the delights of living in the country is the variety of animals we get as neighbours. At Christmas time I was surprised to find this brown hen in our garden at Rose Orchard Haus.  She had flown over the fence and would not be persuaded to go back home so stayed for a couple of weeks before choosing to go on another adventure - we don't know where. This week I heard a rooster crow and looked over the fence to find this new neighbour along with a couple of ducks.  Those feather "boots" must make walking difficult. And here's the other neighbour I love to watch from my kitchen window.  I believe her name is Francesca. And all of these reminded me of the various neighbours at bush block at Whistlers Rest I have shown over the years.  I had fun digging through the archive to find some of them. An assortment of cattle. A pony Sheep and goats And occasional native animals.

Unlike at Burnbrae (our Blue Mountains garden) the rain is taking its time reaching further west. I have been watching this newly dug dam beside the road between our home at Kandos and our bush block at Clandulla.  Some light rain last week started its first puddle of water, I wonder how long it will be before it fills right up. Here is the current state of Whistlers Rest, our bush block - very dry and cleaned up of bark and undergrowth in preparation for the bushfires. We have been seeing rain storms skirt around us.   Yesterday at Mudgee we experienced a big downpour so were watching these grey clouds on our way home hoping they would deliver. The result was a very short sharp storm.  Maybe today will be our day. Windamere Dam is currently 26.9% full which isn't too bad and the good thing is many parts of Australia are now getting welcome rain - we are optimistic for good rainfall sometime soon.

I failed to get a bird shot again this week but I did capture an animal at our bush block - perhaps the increasing dry is bringing the kangaroos back in. Despite the dry the winter flowering styphelia was there to greet me, our native plants are very hardy. That's the end of the Welcome to Winter series, I will go off the air again for a while until I collect some more photos.

Garden number 3 is our bush block at Clandulla, a quick drive from Kandos. Autumn in the Australian bush is much more subtle as all but a small number of our native trees are evergreen.  Here at Whistlers Rest a sign of autumn is this native shrub flowering - I haven't found it's name yet. And in the garden and the forests the gum trees shed their bark. These are archive photos (hence the rain of which we have seen little for a couple of years).  I have been too busy cleaning up the block to run around with a camera.  We have mowed for the first time in two years but there has not been much grass to worry about.  Many of the understory shrubs have died and there are fallen branches and bark all over the place - a fire hazard that I cannot continue to ignore so we have been making the most of the lovely autumn weather for a working bee.

Thinking of the bird photos in my archive I settled on this lovely little chap, taken in May 2011 out at Whistlers Rest.  It is a Jacky Winter.

Thinking about my gardens (as I do on Tuesday) perhaps the most exciting image I have taken in one of my gardens was of this one at Whistler's Rest in February 2011. There was a spider's web stretched across my path and I noticed a tiny spider that glinted with a little bit of colour in the sunlight. My eyesight was not up to fine detail so I poked my camera in her direction and clicked a few times as she scurried along her web ... thinking something interesting might be picked up by my lens. I had no idea I had captured one of these exquisite creatures.

I was getting a bit desperate for this week's bird photo so I sat for a while out at Whistlers Rest to see what would turn up.  This is a Willy Wagtail but it would not participate by putting his tail up in his characteristic jaunty way. I had even less success with the little wrens in the blackthorn - the camera kept focusing on the wrong thing.

We popped over to our bush block on the weekend and it was lovely to see the Blackthorn (Bursaria Spinosa) in flower.  They are quite prickly but I left quite a few stands of them to provide habitat for the little birds.  I also read somewhere recently that they have a synergistic relationship with the eucalyptus trees helping to keep them healthy so another good reason to keep them.

Magpie Lark (Pee Wee) nest and chicks How exciting is this!  I commented on someone's blog recently that I don't see bird's nests, probably because I don't know where to look. Then a short time later noticed a muddy growth on a branch high in one of gum trees at our bush block - I guessed it was a nest but it was way to high for me to investigate. Next time I was out there I saw a black and white bird fly over to it so grabbed my camera and pointed it in that direction. When I enlarged the image I could see the chicks. After a bit of investigation it appears to be the nest of a Magpie Lark.  The image below is of a Magpie Lark that I took many years ago.

Brachyscome I have been neglecting to show the delights of the bush garden, partly because I have been busy in the other two gardens but also because of the drought there has not been the expected spring wildflower display for the past two years.  Since there has been some recent rain I decided to scrounge around their normal haunts to see what might have been persuaded to flower.   Pea flowers, climbing and crawling but not with their normal bounty. Little white flowers Some bright spots of yellow. And the loud hum of bees made me look up and see the gum tree is in flower.

Red Wattlebird I haven't shown much from our bush block at Clandulla so here is one to improve the balance. There are always lots of birds out there but I often don't have to time to sit patiently and capture their images.

We have been at Whistlers Rest painting the interior of the shed which has been recently lined in preparation for moving our library there in coming months.  It is very satifying that it is now nearly done. As I was leaving yesterday I noticed a new flock of sheep has moved into the next door paddock. Our mountain was looking pretty special in the afternoon light too.

Golden Wattle It's wattle time in the forests and Whistlers Rest. I really like the bright splashes of yellow among the trees. A book I have read I am on a mission to fill in gaps in my reading of classics so this week tackled Wuthering Height s by Emily Bronte. I enjoyed it and its masterful writing but it got me thinking.  I have previously mentioned the censorship of school texts in 1970s Queensland.  I am fairly sure this was included in the school curriculum unabridged (no sex).  But reading it today I figured today's sensibilities would censor it for the domestic violence.  I googled and sure enough some schools the USA have banned it

View from Whistlers Rest It's very dry at our native garden.  A little bit of rain has added a slight sheen of green to the next door paddock but not enough for grazing animals yet. Reflection: Psalm 121:1-2 The Message (MSG) "I look up to the mountains; does my strength come from mountains? No, my strength comes from God, who made heaven, and earth, and mountains."