Nature's Place

 
I am told by locals the recent cold spell is almost unprecedented for the area and it is telling on the frog and toad population. Everywhere I look I find dried out frogs and toads and not just around the house. In the rainforest I found a giant toad on the track that hadn’t been touched except by death.

As in a recent post in July, Just Doing What They Do, they are just stopping in their tracks and dying, in the grass on their way somewhere, under a water plant by the tanks, one died absorbing water through the skin of the belly, another climbing a stone, sheltering under some leaves. Everywhere.

Cold and hunger, the almost complete absence of insects as food, is killing them off at decimation rate.

Clearly, life, that which animates the structure, leaves the body.

And the bush flowers are blooming.
 

Walking in the nearby swamp yesterday I was observing the life forms at a few muddy pools of water in the ruts where 4WD’s had passed across the sodden earth. I only saw them when they were disturbed by my passing close by. Bees. They were taking water and nutrients from the wet earth.

If it was only water they were after they could have taken it direct from the pond, as some did. Bees get thirsty and need their vitamins, just like you and me. They were the same kind that stung me, last week?

They are not unlike me and you in their simple needs, just different. Creatures of sense, instinctive intelligence, in form.

The big difference is thought and emotion, they aren’t burdened with it.
 
Copyright Reserved / Mark Berkery