Nature's Place

Today I signed up for a blog with WordPress.com. I have been coming to this for some time but the way I am is to know the field. I have to satisfy myself it is the right course of action. The only way for me to do that is to find out all about the business of blogging, the various means of realising a blog, and the various options within those means. In other words I found out exactly what is available and exactly what I want. And it is a job doing so.

Today I came to the point where I had enough of the looking. There was no more reservation as to what platform to use, or the means by which I would have it online. Now I know what I can do with it and expect from it, more or less. It is really very simple once the homework is done. The homework is the difficult part, it always was.

I am pleased. Really pleased. All the work has borne fruit in that I am completely at ease with what I have done. No more reservation is no more stress. There is always some tension involved when doing something new.

There is the lovely smell of fresh cut grass in the air tonight. Yes, I mowed the lawn again. If you can call it a lawn, it’s about an acre of grass. And I use a push mower. It’s another kind of job. The rain has been regular, almost every day for nearly six weeks. Not always a lot of rain, but regular. It’s been sunny more often than not the last few days.

The conditions are perfect for growing grass, the grass you mow. It will be some time before the rain stops and the grass stops growing, late Autumn, early Winter maybe. In Australia, where I am, the seasons are reversed to the northern hemisphere.

Things are almost back to normal with the mozzies, at least around the house during the day. I can go for short walks at night too without being eaten. It’s the midges turn now. Ha! Little black biters. I just have to plan around the not so pleasant nature here. And it’s Cane Toad season again, no problem, must have frozen twenty in the last few days.

I went for a walk down by the beach this afternoon. Along a track about a hundred metres inland and running parallel to the beach, behind the dunes. A little way in from the road I saw a few unusual birds in the trees and flying about, there was a lovely darkness about them, an elegant mischief. They didn’t stay still long enough for me to photograph them but I got something else that is probably quite rare.

Have you ever noticed how a bird will dump any excess weight before taking flight? It’s almost universal in my experience a bird will shit just before or after takeoff. I’ve seen every kind of bird do it. Today was no exception, the exception was that I caught it on camera. That pellet you can see falling beneath the bird could not be anything else. It was perched on the highest point around, nothing above it. Just after this shot was taken she took to the air and was gone. That’s the way to start any journey, dump the excess baggage.

The birds around here are too fast for me to keep up with, they eat out all the time and don’t let people close at all. There is an abundance of food for them around here after the rains. Maybe I’ll put up a feeder for the winter, and some water, maybe some birds will come my way then. I’ll see.

A bit further on I came to a clearing in the bush and trees between me and the beach. There was only very low ground cover and one dead tree reaching bony fingers to the sky about forty metres away. On these bare branches there were two eagles perched close together.

I stopped dead in my tracks but I was too late, one of them had seen me and was already lifting off the branch. The other one looked around to see what had caused the first to take flight. He didn’t see me at first, maybe because I didn’t move. But then he must have recognised the silhouette and immediately followed the first into the air.

I hadn’t even turned the camera on yet. I let it go and walked on for a while until I came to a track running left down to the beach. It was nice to walk in the cool water with the waves washing in right up to the dunes. There was a fisherman on the beach a long way ahead and I saw one of the eagles along the line of vegetation, never venturing far from the cover of the bush.

Every now and then I would see it in the distance swooping out to the waters edge to pick up something, food no doubt. And then fly back in to cover. I’ve seen the eagles around here catching fairly big fish from the rivers, but I don’t know if they will dive into the sea, but why not? As I approached him, eyeing him up for a shot (of the camera), he took to the air and came to rest further on down the beach.

So next time I approached him I avoided looking at him directly, I looked out to sea while seeing him with my peripheral vision. That worked, I got close enough to snap him as he stood at the edge of the sand, apparently unconcerned this time. I think looking too intently and directly probably made him uneasy. I just managed to get him in the frame as he took off again, a bit of a blur but the outline is dramatic.

When I got home I started going through what I can and can’t do with the blog. It’s going to take me some time to get to know this amazing publishing tool.

Isn’t it incredible it is possible to publish to a worldwide audience of millions on the net, and for free! All that is necessary is to have something of real value to offer. And someone to read it.

Truly amazing.

All copyright reserved / Mark Berkery