Birds
The Laughing Kookaburra. Usually seen in a family group, who knows what’s happened to the rest of them. S/he sits on the post in the garden, surveying the landscape and lets me take a few pictures. With winter coming I have some food ready for them, just enough to keep going. We’ll see … Proud thing.
The Butcher Bird, a youngster. Comes with mum and dad who sing their melodious song, and so I give them a bite to eat. It’s always a pleasure to engage with them, to say hello. Everyone communicating in their way. They come and they go without attachment.
Eastern Curlew. Crazy Curlew. Well, they do give that impression at times but nothing in the wild is crazy. That epithet is rightly reserved for Man, describing an unnatural condition on the way out and then a season to pass through on the way home again. It’s all quite natural, for Man.
Curlew again, because I like it so much. They have no self-consciousness, just do what they do and move on, to do what they do. Driven by instinct, especially for food and shelter now that winter is coming. But wherever there is engagement with the wild life there is a communication, in some sense.
House Martins, or Swifts, they make their nests under the jetty at Victoria Point. Too fast for an in flight shot and the only time they stop still is when the wind is up. And so it was, a howling wind made captive subjects. Captured by nature, their own nature. Aren’t we all … Until we’re not.
Now what does that mean … But anyway, little darlings, aren’t they.
Honey eater, female I think. They life a bit of fruit too.
The one that got away, the lost picture. A pelican in flight overhead. Just got the one shot, not bad I think. Let’s see what the new season brings.
Now that summer is over and the supply of food is diminishing the wildlife is getting hungry, not just the birds.
Wallabies, rats, iguanas, everything is feeling the change of season and what it means when you live a wild life.
On the edge, hunger not too sharp yet, competition not so fierce. Though the wildlife do it differently.
Nobody holds on to the past. Whatever is done is done and gone. Every day is a new day.
They have no ‘second’ nature to trouble them. No remembrance of facts interpreted.
Just life as it is here and now.
The wild life.
© Mark Berkery … Click on those pictures for a closer look …
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Spidery Ways
At the edge of the verandah where it was relatively dry, for spidery business, a big huntsman sat immobile, in observation.
In a flurry of spidery action, legs and fangs whipped to instinctive focus, an unfortunate one treading, became a spidery meal.
The rain kept up and another refugee, wolf spidery mum and her yet to hatch spiderlings, came in out of the wet.
And so you know I’m not making it up, a batch of hatched spiderlings on another mum’s back, hiding. How she looks after them.
From behind, she wasn’t stopping still for long, gotta get the little ones to safety, in a ball, carried by a thread.
And from the front, what’s this, a springtail maybe, at home in the wet. But too small to eat, lucky creature, springtail.
It’s been raining a lot lately and at times the ground moves with the life forms traveling on the wet.
Refugees, just some of nature’s creatures seeking respite from the deluge.
And what is death to one is life to another.
Such are the ways.
© Mark Berkery … Click on those pictures for a closer look …
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Nature's Place 
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