Rachel Carson - The Silent Spring

My friend the factory-farmer uses pesticides as most people do, and if you dear reader saw regional TV the advertising of agricultural chemicals would shock you. Paddocks full of mammals full of stuff to keep worms and fleas at bay, and that stuff is in your meaty dinner. The pasture is full of chemicals too because factory-farming, where stock breeding numbers are artificially inflated by artificial insemination, needs the grass to grow faster to fatten them.
All these chemicals are produced by big agri-pharma and they would do anything to eliminate the evidence of Saint Rachel Carson, who has today had the Google banner accolade.
Ms Carson was a pioneer of ecological awareness and is the patron saint of all those tree-huggers who understand the balance of the planet. Leaves make oxygen and that is so good, concrete production is a worse polluter than anything else.
My blog pal Kath at Goofing Off In Geneva really misses the oodle-ardle song of the Magpies since she had to leave Melbourne. Imagine if there were no birds at all.
Please follow this link to the Wiki of hero Ms Rachel Carson if you have never read
her 1963 book The Silent Spring.

a Claytons post

Forty degrees is only funny for the first week. Now I want it to stop.

I got the potato crop in. More than this amount, with no care whatsoever, and all from a few Past Their UseBy leftovers that I flung against the back fence. Lots of potato recipes on the food boards at Pinterest where I have taken up residence trading with JahTeh - see link in sidebar.

This is my Kooka friend who has a baby, or Early Kooka, up in the high trees waiting for mince deliveries. Why do I feed them mince? I want to distract them from eating the tiny lizards of course.
Going away now to Google "heat stroke"
x x

Tuxedo Cat, with rose arbor.

Twelve years ago I was working in my fence-free front garden when some children were passing with a tiny kitten. "We found it!" and they were so pleased.
"Was there a mother cat?" I asked.
"Dunno." and off they went.
I had to go la-la-la for a while, to get all the sad animal thought out of my head. However, me and St. Francis have a good thing going, and the next day they were back -
"Mum Says ... it's gunna die."
I took the kitten to work every day in a box and did the eye dropper thing relentlessly, and there she is today, on the bed in the window, waiting for a bird, any bird, to land on that power line.
We are finally re-united after she was at Boarding School (Friend's Farm Campus) during my six itinerant years. We haz a home.

wild weekend

My photo, taken from our table, of the smug city seagulls on their million-dollar Federation Square perch, complacently observing us eat.
After a big Saturday Night in the best seats At The Opera thanks to the generosity of That's So Pants, how lovely it was for us both to Sunday Blogger-Brunch with Hawt Highriser, the legendary, elusive and saintly R, and Copperwitch.

We were, however, scanning the horizon for Sanity Clause who failed to appear because he was looking for his phone, left in someone else's car for the second time in a week.

After the delicious food, Pants and I really enjoyed the British Watercolours 1760-1900 collection of the NGV just up the road. See my groovy image left, showing how blatantly 'designer' Roy Grounds regurgitated the style of Le Corbusier.

See that desk top right? That is the place for paying membership fees to the NGV association. When I approached waving the application and money, the 'Attendant' fled, claiming it was closing time.

For some reason Pants blogger finds this hilarious.

We then 67-trammed to my cousin in Caulfield for a garden party with poodles, dragging ourselves away to do battle with Vline and the horror that is So Cross Station, to get back to opposite sides of regional Victoria. What a weekend.

just Ducky

At the end of my street there is a swamp the council calls 'a lake' and these 12 baby ducks were bobbing around on it today.

billabong birdie

Eastern Rosellas in this burkes backyard.Parent birds look horrified to have bred a Thorpedo child.Scientific name Platycercus-eximius may have confused bird into swimming like a platypus.I enjoyed it all without even leaving my chair inside. It's freezing in Ballarat right now, and bloody Summer Time starts tomorrow getting up an hour earlier than it 'feels like' - up with the birds as they say.

swanning about on the lake

Cob: "hey Beryl! - don't take the kids near the bloody traffic ... "

Cob: "Jeepers darling, it's dangerous on land."


Pen: "Sheesh."

This blogger has come in from the goat paddocks out west, and now has swans at the end of the street. SPRING.

woo hoo

Masked OWL, well-spotted by this bird sook, while walking across the bridge yesterday at 5pm. He thought he was hidden, in trees on the Campaspe.

This species is on the 'threatened' list.

(Both these images are virtually copyrighted Annie ODyne )

Click on the images for larger.

lucky me

Today included passing Lake Wendouree in Ballarat and of course I had to say hello to these swan babies gliding around in the winter sun. Swans are monogamous, vegetarian, and very good parents. What's not to love?

(images copyright Annie O'Dyne)

Steer me through the fog

 

These steers are weary as I am of the endless fog - this photo of them and their friends the cattle egrets was taken in the afternoon yesterday. Everyone is very relaxed so I guess the egrets have eaten all the ticks off the steers and are just hanging out.

Eucalypt, Yeo, 7am.

In a foggy Autumn dawn, from the front door of my present haven, this gum tree soars over the old dairy shed.

The realisations provoked by this sight, put me back in my tiny place in Time and on planet Earth, as it revolves, for the moment, in dark space, relying on a flaming sun for each new day.

Later, a pair of Gang-Gang cockatoos landed in it, getting my attention with their very funny call, which sounds just like a big old creaking door - 'waaarrrk!'.

(Of course I didn't get a photo ... I found this one thanks to www.pixdaus.com.)