A Christmas Gift from Mother Nature

 

The Monarch (Wanderer) butterflies seem to thrive on the Milkweed bush in the back garden here at home. The bush is about six years old now -- I keep it very well pruned -- and we counted upwards of 25 caterpillars before they started to chrysalis. Around 80% of the chrysalises seem to have hatched, and so far we haven't found any of the new-hatched Wanderers dead in the vicinity, so they really do seem to thrive here. This was a genuinely beaut Christmas gift from Mother Nature, and we were lucky enough to get good pictures in a patch of sunshine between the omnipresent rain...

It's raining again, in January, and the hills are green. Still green? Green again? Very weird. By this time of the year, the state of South Australia ought to be burned brown and desiccated, but this year everything remains soooo green -- 

The downside to which is, I'm not going to be able to save the roses. There's rust and black spot on every single bush, and some are a disaster zone. I'm pretty disappointed with this, because I had them looking marvellous before all the rain came back. Well ... back to square one and start again! Time to cut them back to sticks and spray everything in sight.

The forecast for these coming days also includes rain, so I'll just wait and see if January gets warmer before I start with the chemicals. Argh. 

Hasn't the weather been strange?!

 

Well, obviously you've seen the lake at St Francis Winery like this before --

-- in June or July or August. In winter, yes? But --

But this isn't winter. This is tickling the middle of December, two weeks from the height of the Christmas season. And after a cool, muggy, wet spring, we're now having a wet, stormy -- and intermittently bloody hot -- summer, which is far from what we expected when El Nino was announced, following three La Nina years. 

But ... well, apparently, this is the first time there's been a positive (or is it negative??) Indian Ocean Dipole at the same time. The Indian and Pacific Oceans are both warm (too warm!) at the same time, there's no place for the usual heat exchange to take place -- which is what causes the hot dry, burning conditions of the normal El Nino summer. And according to what I've read lately, no one really knows how this will play out in the real world, in real time.

Can we say "Climate change" yet? So...

As we go into our Christmas shopping, the whole region is on on flood alert! I find myself stretching my memory back over more than fifty years to think of the last time it rained until Christmas, and yes, I do remember this. 

In 1972, the weather settled in and it rained, and rained, and the rained some more. We were living at Glenelg at the time, and I recall slogging to and from school in endless drizzle and occasional downpours, right through the school year, which ended just as the Christmas season began. So, let's immortalize this moment ...

... with a screenshot from the BOM which tells all, and what it doesn't tell is encapsulated here, in the continuing forecast through to December 15:

And there's really no answer to that, is there? So we're just going to settle in and make Christmas preparations. The tree is up, presents are wrapped, 75% of the shopping is done. There's just the menu to arrange, then we're settled in for the season, such as it is. Dave has to work through Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, same as always ... one learns to adapt. And anyway, Christmas is a time for home. 

Just as well, because this isn't the weather to be going anywhere! And as for the tree -- pretty as always. But we might get a new one next year...

Interlude in the Catch-up Process: La Nina takes its toll in this backyard

Feeling sad ... sigh. The wind-and-rain storm came through here like an express train last night, and when I went out for a breath of fresh air, in a break in this incessant cold rain ... Charles de Gaulle is down. I'm kicking myself now, because in ten years I never troubled to photograph it properly. It was always just ... there. It was the old rose tree Zolie loved to climb -- which is why the only longshots of it are ones in which she's perched.

It was always outrageously difficult to photograph its huge, mop-head flowers, because almost as soon as they opened, they began to spoil; and, fair to say, the place it was planted had a fence in the background in one direction, plus the neighbour's shed, and from t'other side it was lost in the background clutter of the lemon tree. So I put off and put off photographing it, even when it was in full bloom, with a dozen or twenty huge flowers. Then suddenly, it's too late.

Soooo ... the plan right now is to take several cuttings off it, while the plant is still viable (tomorrow morning), and it's also possible that one or more of its numerous runners might be nurtured into a new shrub off the old root mass. But at the moment ... there it is, sheared right off at the base and lying flat in the area Dave calls "the plum pit," because it's a sunken garden where the old plum tree lives. Sigh.

And yes, I shed a tear. In fact, I shed a lot.

Playing Catch-up With Myself: October Arrives With a Whimper

 

October. What can you say about the first half it it? The weather was enough to make you weep, and we stayed closed to home. I was juuust starting to throw off the virus, and hoping to get out, get moving, but what you don't want to do is be halfway well and head out into sheets of freezing rain! 

So we didn't do much of anything for the first couple of weeks. I slogged around the house, walking aimlessly to get the legs moving, lifting embarrassing flea-weights, doing Qigong, when and if my body would allow it; and sometimes it wouldn't. 

Still, by the mid-point of the month we were able to brave the conditions and head south for a blustery afternoon. This, above, is Second Valley. Looks like the dead of winter, but in fact, we were six weeks since the beginning of spring, and I'd started to fret that the summer heat would hit us without warning, with no appreciable spring to speak of. (It sorta, kinda did, but not quite as suddenly or as hard as I'd worried).

The high point of that afternoon was the Singing Honey Eater who came to check out the picnic bags we'd put on the mosaiced concrete table near the jetty. And just to prove it was spring ... the pink version of the Raging Fumitory was in full bloom. The pink one seems to bloom well after the white one ... oh yes, this was spring -- though you wouldn't have known it at the time!

Still, onward and upward. Time to make plans to go somewhere, do something. And what we had in mind was a daytrip over to Yorke Peninsula. Now, BC (Before Covid), we'd have done it over two days and stayed overnight at a nice cabin in a caravan park somewhere on the south tip of the Yorke --

After Covid? Nope. How can you know for sure that the last people staying there weren't riddled with Covid, coughing and sneezing all over the cabin, then vacating it and handing it to you?! You can't. And since we know the virus can live for 72 hours on fabrics, and it's transmitted via touch, Dave and I long ago made the decision to stay out of accommodations until/unless a proper vaccine comes along that cures this thing. I mean CURES it, not just lessens the effect while your brain turns to glue wi8th repeated infections.

So -- the Yorke Peninsula daytrip was on, and planned, and we did it on October 20. This will be the next of my Catching-Up With Myself journal entries, and I'll get into it tomorrow. 

Yes, you could be assured that it was spring, grey skies notwithstanding, because --

I'm going to congratulate myself on this last photo: Yay! I managed to rescue "Fire and Ice," which I'd once thought was so dead, it was due to be transferred to the bin. Let this be a lesson: never give up, not if there's one spark of life left. Fire and Ice is now one of the most beautiful bushes in the garden!

So ends the July 2022 catchup...

 

End of July, 2022

...all of which catches me up with July 2022. This was still about six weeks or so before Covid came for a flying visit and seemed to invite itself to stay for a couple of months. At this point, Dave and I were still trying to plan ahead for a possible trip to the Limestone Coast. 'Twas not to be, of course: cancelled for the third year running. This time around, it was on account of Covid and heavy weather ... this is the third consecutive La Nina winter, and it's wreaking havoc. 

A few cancelled travel plans were the least of it -- and of course, I'm writing this in January, 2023, "playing catch up with myself" to full in the blanks in this blog, because I'd very much like to pick up the threads, and with the benefit of hindsight, complaining about the weather seems petty. People lost their homes, the livelihoods and their lives. So we lost a vacation: hunh. 

But by the end of July, even though Covid was some weeks off, I was feeing it -- "it" being SAD, or Seasonally Affected Disorder. Call it cabin fever, or winter blues. Call it anything you like, it's the same thing: a deep fit of the moody blues caused by being shut inside too much, for too long, because the weather sucks, your health is iffy and dodgy, and you seriously dread catching the plague! 

So we spent our days hiking in remote spots, well away from people, hoping to get some great photos to mark the passage of the seasons. Sometimes, though, you didn't have to go far from home:

This little beauty, above, was sitting on one of the succulent flowers about four meters from the front door as we walked out yesterday, for a drive down to Goolwa -- Dave and I again, making the most of low fuel prices while they last -- because they won't. I got about a dozen nice images, and it was sooo easy ... the rest of the day, I struggled with low light, uncooperative birds and frozen fingers! But we did the walk to the lookout above Mount Bold, hoping to see wildlife ... a deer, right on the trail before us! (And yeeees, I know they're feral, and have become a real pest in Tasmania and New Zealand, but they're beautiful, and I like them.)

Just a day or two later, this, below, is waaaay on the other side of Perry Bend Reserve, far closer to the dunes, but I'd tag it as Perry Bend, because I don't know what to call the location, otherwise! I mean ... you're in the middle of a marsh, looking at massive amounts of sky, river and saltbush, so ... Perry Bend it is. I got lots of pics of waterfowl, which I always intended to share, but never did because the SAD caught up with me, and before I shook it loose, Covid came knocking at the door. Argh.

Vacation Week 2020!

For a week when we has to dodge showers and dress for winter, we did an amazing amount. The forecast had been for rain and unseasonable cold, and this didn't tell the half of it ... snow fell in South Australia on Friday, -- it was lucky we'd done our day trip into the Flinders Ranges on Thursday, because the storm which brought the snow was coming in just as we drove south! We might have been lucky once or twice ... in retrospect, if the heavy weather had arrived even 12 hours earlier, we could have been caught out in the wilderness when the "floodways" started to run, unable to get back to civilization! I guess Dave's guardian angel was looking out for us, because we didn't get caught, and we did have a fantastic time...

I wouldn't have believed you could do this in a day ... Flinders Ranges, out and back, between 6:00am and 9:30pm, including a storm?! It had to be a joke. But no -- it turned out to be perfectly doable, and this was Thursday! Previously, we'd stayed in our own neck of the woods, getting as far afield as the Laratinga Wetlands on the other side of Mount Barker, and Mannum (it rained), via Mount Pleasant (so cold, I had to drink hot chocolate to get back to life); and on Saturday -- I traded Dave for Friday: he did his bike ride a day early, and we hit the road again on Saturday instead -- we headed south and stumbled over the Ferries McDonald Conservation Park, where the wildflowers and orchids are in full bloom. That was a tremendous pleasure, but I'll post those photos -- also the Fairy Wren pictures from Laratinga -- another time.

So ... Flinders Ranges in a day! Breakfast at Locheal, with its pink lake, north of Port Wakefield, and then lunch at Quorn, followed by three hours of tarryhooting on wilderness roads where the views are beyond amazing, before we turned for home at 4:00, with a four-and-a-half-hour drive ahead of us, returning by a different rout ... Willmington, Gladstone, Laura, Clare, Gawler, at which point you connect with the northern expressway and you'll be home in less than an hour. 

The trip had one last amazement in store for us:

As I mentioned before, the weather was due to change, big time, though we hadn't realized quite how violently it would change. In fact, in about twelve hours this storm front would be dumping snow on the Flinders Ranges! We drove right into it, at a time when it was all about torrential trail. The kind of rain where your wipers can barely keep pace. Spectacular -- also a wake-up call, to be a little more careful and plan a bit more assiduously next time! Because we'll definitely be going back; the only questions are when and how! 

Punchbowl Lookout ... and WHAT is going on with this February weather?!

Taking my shiny new camera for another walk -- this time to Punchbowl Lookout, which is an easy hike, a kilometer in, same out on the same trail, albeit uphill ... and I could have wished for beautiful weather to road-test the aforementioned camera. The conditions at Onkaparinga Gorge were so dark, the camera popped the auto-flash, in broad daylight, at ten o'clock in the morning! Not only that, it was chilly and blustery. February?!

(Fair enough ... we'll be back up to 30C+ in a few days, with some modest heat for about 72 hours before we dip back into the 20s; but this ain't February weather, folks. Not even close. Back in November, when the heat began, the long-range forecasters warned about a long, super-hot summer. We got colossal temperatures in January (and the fires I woll never forget as long as I live). Then this. And although I have to say I'm completely relieved to not have to contend with 40 degree heat for week after week, I also have to note that this February weather is atypical. Abnormal. Not right. Something is ... wrong. Weather reports from Antarctica last week recorded 20C temperatures one day. It was as warm there as here. Say, what now???)

Anyway -- Punchbowl Lookout, in dismal conditions:

The awful conditions at least gave me a chance to work hard with the camera, make it produce images that could be "rescued" in the computer later. These have all been heavily tweaked to make it look as if the sun came out; but if you look at any shot on which the sky shows, you'll see that Mister Blue was well and truly in hiding. Took a lot of work in the computer to get these images up to speed, and I must go back to Punchbowl with the Lumix, when the sun is shining.

Praying for rain

Headlines on radio the other day told South Aussies pretty much what we already know: we're struggling through the driest start to winter on record:

Sure, the skies are frequently overcast, but it almost never rains ... and when it does, it's a tiny patter of drizzle, not enough to make the garden moist, let alone get the winter graze growing to save the herds, or get the crops moving.

Dave and I took a drive across back roads in the Myponga - to - Tooperang region, and, well, see for yourself:

Above: Myponga Reservoir. In almost fifty years in this state, I've never seen it this low. The treeline shows you where the water level ought to be. Yes, there's plenty of water still in the catchment, but the levels how you what's happening in the hills, where rain ought to be falling, and isn't...

The small farm catchments are getting dangerously low; some have dried up entirely. I've seen cattle standing beside a six-inch lake of mud, with no grass in sight. Makes your blood run cold, while graziers across the country are reported as being "suicidal," as they watch their livestock stuffer and, eventually, cull numbers both to save what they can, leave the opportunity to start again later when the drought breaks, and to minimize suffering.

As you can see in the second picture, above, this paddock -- which by May should be green grass to the skyline -- looks like the beach. The wind blows, and the sand just drifts out into the road. This specific paddock is on the hill above Tooperang ... it's beef cattle grazing country:

Above: This is not the beach. It's the roadside. And that is scary. Want it charted scientifically? No problem. A quick hop over to the Bureau of Meteorology produces this:

...which gave the picture on March 31. Now add another month. It hasn't rained more than a day in April, in any one area, and even on that day it didn't rain enough.

To quote my favorite RCMP Mountie ... "Oh, dear."