White robin

Over late summer and into autumn we were graced with the antics of a pair of white robins flitting and feeding through our garden. Early in April I flushed a fledgling from some shrubs near the chook yard.. It flew straight out in front of me with the parents looking on from near by. After staring at me for a moment it flew into the bush next door. These are the photos I took of it feeding in our garden on subsequent occasions. It looks a little scruffy because it still has some of it's baby fluff.

Unfortunately this story has a sad ending. I found the poor little bird dead one morning at the end of April. Soon after that I found the White robin's nest in my shade house - a well built little cup of woven grasses nestled in the fronds of a large elkhorn. No wonder I saw the adults so frequently. Since then I have found an older nest in another elkhorn. With a bit of luck they will try again and this time with more success.

Cuckoos and caterpillars

This horsefield's bronze cuckoo is a new comer to my vege patch seen recently. It has been feeding on the bugs and caterpillars in my garden - and it is looking quite fat on it. We've heard its sharp descending whistle for some time now, especially in the early mornings, but until now it had stayed out of sight.

Here it is perched above a tomato plant, spying on green caterpillars.

 Below it is amongst the radish plant that I have let go to seed.

This cuckoo, like many, is a nest parasite and particularly, but not exclusively, likes nests with a domed construction. There should be plenty of those around here as wrens and thornbills are always to be seen and heard in the garden. The female lays one speckled egg in the chosen host nest and the incubation period is usually shorter than the hosts which gives the cuckoo chick the upper hand - or foot in the case of the chick - as they turf the competition out of the nest.

Better than the fox

Apart from a vixen with a den full of hungry cubs,

this time of the year provides a garden full of colour

with exotics

and subtle native flowers - Agonis flexuosa 

and riotous kangaroo paws

and the promise of summer fruit - Paradise pear

Signs of spring

Earlier this week I saw my first clutch of ducklings down at our dam. For a while now the wood ducks have been here feeding on the lush pasture, splashing and swimming in the dam and disappearing into the bush to check out their nest hollows in the karri and marri trees. Occasionally one gives a rousing strident call from high in a tree and I often wonder if it is a call to the newly hatched babies to 'jump' and freefall to the ground. I continue to be amazed they survive it - but of course they do.

I've no idea where they take their clutch of tiny fluffy ducklings in the evenings. But one often sees the pair of adults leading them uphill away from the water to a safe hidey-hole where the foxes hopefully won't find them.Inexperienced parents often lose their entire clutch, but sometimes they learn quickly enough to save the   last two or three and raise them successfully. At the end of the season old hands will  be seen leading a dozen or so fully grown duck teenagers on the rounds of the dams and paddocks in our little valley.

As I type this, outside I can hear the beautiful trill of the inland thornbill, a tiny bird with a richness of sound that belies it's size. Yesterday one was calling from a potted magnolia in my herb garden beside our verandah. Beautiful.

Flutter, flutter, bump

In the first light of the morning we woke to the sounds of flutter flutter bump, flutter flutter bump,
...  flutter flutter ...  'Sounds like an old lady moth bumping against the ceiling, trying to get out'.

But it's the wrong time of the year for that. Flutter flutter bump. 

It was a female blue wren attacking her reflection in the window, fluttering up and down in sync with her alter ego. Flutter flutter bump. She kept on at it till our movement sent her off into the garden. Minutes later she was back at the next window, chasing her reflection up and down the glass. Here you can see her rich chestnut eye mask.

Since we came back from our holidays, one of the first things we did was give all the windows a good clean. Obviously it was enough to spark this new behaviour from the wren. I find it strange that it is the female who is doing the attacking, I would have thought it was the domain of the male, but the males have been fairly circumspect lately. In our garden here we have both the blue wren and the red winged wrens flitting about. I love their voice, I call them our natural canaries. They all trill, males and females, perching high with their throats extended as they sing to the world.

Later in the morning a blue male came in to feed with a group of five other females and youngsters, his feathered coat sheening in the patchy sunlight. They are so delicate and light on their legs as they skip over the ground picking up tiny morsels that only they can see.

In the past I have found their nests hidden deep within the Hakea oleifolia that I planted in our garden. The foliage is suitably prickly and dense, and the shrub high enough, that the wrens can nest there secure from predators.

Winter welcome

Our transition to winter has been marked by a steady 115mm of rain in the last two days. It has been wet - it is wet. Part of the highway west of here has been washed away - the road base disappeared under the constant pressure of water followed by the collapse of the bitumen on top. The hardy SES guys were out there directing traffic around the blowout. That's winter for you. The grand finale early this morning was a spectacular thunderstorm, thunder rumbling in long surges, first inland then out to the sea. A golden dawn slipped under the cloud cover, the first sunlight we'd seen for a few days. Now as I write we have brilliant blue skies, and the sunlight sparkles off the riverlets of water pouring over the supersaturated hillside. Our dam is nearly full of light brown water which is still pouring in, quite a change from the milky pale of a few days ago.

We had warm sunny weather in the last days of autumn. Here is a sample of that rich late autumn offering in my garden. The first image is of the beautiful globular flowers of the Hakea laurina x petiolaris, a shrub that grows 2-3m high. I grew these from seeds collected from our former property where I had them growing side by side in a hedge. The black cockatoos loved feeding on the seeds. It was an odd sight - the black cockies so huge swinging off the slim branches of the Hakeas, slicing open the nuts with their razor sharp bills, squarking to each other as they do between beak fulls. Here it is the honeyeaters and smaller parrots that feed on the blossom - so far.

Hakea laurina x petiolaris

I have a range of fruit trees growing here and late autumn is the time for apples, medlars, persimmons and tamarillos. I cooked up the last of our quince with some lamb the other day and it was delicious. I have been eating an apple a day, each day they get sweeter, and by the time I eat the last one I expect it to be honey sweet. I haven't used the medlars yet but have seen a few recipes that I may try now that I have a bit of time. Medlar chutney coming up.

Medlar

The persimmons are so delicately flavoured. I love them at the squishy stage best of all. Miske loves them too and will pig out on them if she gets a chance. The tree is a sight covered in rich orange globes and now the foliage is just starting to turn it will be even more brilliant. You wouldn't believe the reason I planted this tree. I saw a recipe for a frozen persimmon desert served with mascarpone and amaretto and had to try it - so in went the tree. It has been worth the wait. Here is a link to the recipe

Persimmon

Lucky last are the tamarillos. The fruit glows in the sunlight, and even if you don't eat them they are worth growing for their long lasting colour.We eat them fresh, sucking out the middle and throwing the skins away. The puppies love to play with them and I've been finding half eaten fruit all over the garden. Next year there will be tamarillo plants sprouting all over the garden. We have the same trouble with tomatoes. They appear everywhere because the fruit is raided by birds and animals alike.

Tamarillo

I try to grow enough for our household and the wildlife, but I will admit to netting most of the fruit trees. The native garden I have grown was designed especially for the birds and little animals, reptiles and frogs ( we started off with a grass paddock). I try to follow an old Papuan saying which goes something like 'there are no garden pests, only hungry animals'. So I try to keep them happy as well.