Stand down, Tofu - your services are no longer required

 Tibbs has left the building.

My life as a chicken-substitute is over. No more chooking in the woodshed on cold days with Tibbs the Literary Chicken, who liked anything by Ernest Henningway, but was particularly fond of The Crows of Kilimanjaro and A Farewell to Farms.

I’m heartbroken.

As a tribute to my little feathered friend, who was helped from this world by the vet today, let me show you the last garden project that we worked on together.

Before the new fence was built last year, there was a dead space along one side of the house, bounded by a gate and the woodshed and populated by a couple of straggly dead trees. some rocks and hundreds of fleabane weeds. My spare room looked out upon a brand new 6-foot fence and a bleak and cheerless wasteland, so Tibbs and I decided to revamp it a bit.

So.... first of all we dug out the rocks (and ate worms).

Step Two: we pulled out the remaining weeds and patchy grass (and ate more worms)

Tibbs posing: “All my own work”. What? No it wasn’t! (although she DID eat all the worms.)

She temporarily lost interest when I put down weedmat, but was happy when I got the gravel down. 

She was even happier to see the birdbath and rocks appear, some potted plants, and the new coat of paint that transformed the woodshed. 

In the photo below she is inspecting the new space - admittedly, still a work in progress, but vastly improved - and giving it her seal of approval.

On Sunday she started making strange noises now and then, a bit like a sneeze. This morning she had her beak open to breathe, was wheezing, and wouldn’t come out of the nest box.

Coincidentally, the wonderful vet from Orbost was making a house call to vaccinate the cats today, so I asked him to take a look at Tibbs while he was here. I told him about her recent oviduct infection, and my home vetting treatment – and he said I’d absolutely done the right thing. What was ailing her today was a respiratory infection of some sort – and with the recent outbreak of Avian Flu near Bairnsdale, he thought it prudent to euthanase her, notify the Ag dept and take her remains for testing. I cried buckets, sniffling inside my mask and thanking her for her company and her great help in the garden. I stroked her feathers as her eyes slowly closed and her consciousness ebbed away. 

Poor Tiblet the Giblet doesn’t even get to rest in the chook cemetery, here at home with her old buddies. Sigh. She always was the Outsider of the flock. I think it's appropriate, then, to rename her final project the Tibbs Memorial Garden.

Bye, my Tibby, and thank you for everything you taught me about digging in the dirt, enjoying simple things like a little sit in the woodshed - and the joy of hanging out in the yard with a feathery friend.

Team Chook and the Kikuyu Project

Team Chook: focussed and ready for action

I alluded, in an earlier post, to my insane and largely futile attempt to get on top of the Kikuyu takeover of my yard.

Kikuyu grass is an impressive adversary. It snakes along under and above ground, pushing out pointy stabby runners and grabby roots. Do not turn your back on it, seriously! It crawls over and under things at the speed of - well, Kikuyu grass - inexorable and unstoppable in its quest for world domination. Forget lizard overlords - Kikuyu is worse than any crazy megalomaniac reptile.

Nasty pointy stabby runner looking for some ground now that it's
managed to burrow beneath the rocks of the retaining wall

Rocks are no obstacle to this stuff - it just powers on underneath

 

If it can't go down, it'll go up and over...

...and down the other side.

This stuff is monstrous, I tell you!

Wikipedia says: The tropical grass species Pennisetum clandestinum is known by several common names, most often kikuyu grass, as it is native to the highland regions of East Africa that is home to the Kikuyu people. Because of its rapid growth and aggressive nature, it is categorised as a noxious weed in some regions. (Hear hear! Here here! say I)

Lawn Solutions Australia says: Due to its vigorous growth patterns, Kikuyu is a very invasive grass and doesn't tend to want to stay put in its designated area.  (And that, my friends, is what's known as an understatement!)

I say: DAMN YOU, Kikuyu, you will not win!!!! Well, a slightly modified version of that - you will not win ALL the garden. Some bits are MINE!

Right about now you should be hearing the theme music from Mission: Impossible  in your head. It's what I hear whenever I look at the expanse of Kikuyu-infested gravel.

To launch this major operation, I enlisted two experienced excavators:

             

Agent Sybil...

...and Agent Tibbs

As these girls have been largely responsible for creating the environment in which Kikuyu can thrive, I thought it a nice touch of irony to enlist their help with the clean-up. Not that they were unwilling. Any chance to get beaks and claws into the dirt.

The area of the gravel patch and retaining wall, circa 2013 - pre chook

This is how we work: I identify a runner or a deeply-rooted flatleaf weed and start pulling or digging it out.  Team Chook joins me in a flash. The girls start pecking, scratching and kicking. Repeat. Over and over and over.

When my back starts to ache or my weedbag is chockers, I call it a day. I return to the site a couple of days later to find that Team Chook has excavated a whole new lot of runners for me. And so it goes on.

I feel a bit like an archeologist. The team has excavated enough Kikuyu to expose what I think may be the foot of the retaining wall. What appeared to be about 12cm high is easily 30cm high.

How was this deplorable annexation allowed to occur in the first place? The first thing you need to know is that I have a long, sorry history of garden incompetence, interspersed with sudden bursts of frenetic activity. The second is this: the chooks, scratching about in the ex-vegetable bed (I ceded the territory to the chooks after a long and fruitless (also vegetableless!) battle), kicked lots of lovely soil out onto the gravel. Weeds and Kikuyu leapt onto it. Layer upon layer kept being added. Eventually the Kikuyu (and minimal soil) provided a fab false "ground" for weeds to set roots into. (TAKE NOTE: This is how world domination begins - with a small corner of the gravel patch.) Compounding factors included a human (me) too flattened by Ross River Virus or other nasty ailments to do anything more than sit and watch helplessly during the last couple of major growth seasons. Sigh.

Thankfully, the pandemic lockdown has given me the time and energy to Fight Back. I will not be vanquished by grass! One day this small patch of garden will be mine again. With the judicious application of carefully shaped chook wire I may even grow lettuces or something.

In the meantime I'm refusing to think about the evil Kikuyu Empire's expansionist behaviour at my borders. That's a battle for another season.

Behind the Barricades - Stay at Home, Day#??

My Isolation Hair is a fright and I don't even care!

My daughter says I look like a mad scientist - I'll take that as a compliment!

I actually forgot it was the Easter Weekend this weekend. By the Thursday before Good Friday there's usually excitement and activity building over the big Easter market and the influx of Easter visitors from all over. The place is usually hopping. Not this year.

We saw our tourists depart, almost in convoy, about 2 weeks ago, after government orders to close caravan parks. While part of me was very glad to see them go, I also felt terribly sad for them as I watched the caravans roll past. They were heading back into an uncertain and fragile situation in their own home towns and cities, and it must've been frightening.

Mallacoota is a ghost town, coming into what would be our second-busiest time of a " normal" year. This entire year has been anything but normal! Most of the shops are closed. The library is closed. COVID-19 sanitiser stations have been mounted outside our supermarkets, where valiant staff continue to keep the shelves stocked. The Post Office arcade has 1.5m lines painted on the ground.  The volunteer-run community radio station, which is also the local emergency broadcaster, has seen some changes as a few of our older or more vulnerable presenters go into self-isolation.

My April calendar image seems strangely appropriate as we are all "confined to barracks" and isolated from our normal lives. Many people don't meet your eye when you pass them in the street, as if they think infection might be spread at a glance.

The District Health Service is overseeing deliveries of medication, groceries and newspapers to those in isolation. Dr Sara from the Medical Centre keeps the community up to date with a weekly radio interview.

I don't know whether the school will re-open next week (must find out). The Sanctuary - a youth centre set up during the fires, is operating in a virtual world, making the most of ZOOM for its activities.

Anxiety over the threat of pestilence and a sense of impending doom underlie the gentler rhythm that life currently thrums along to. Everything has slowed to a dreamy snail's pace. It's like mid-winter, only warmer.

Whopper fungus!

The quietude at home is punctuated by the rumble of supply trucks rolling past. The bushfire clean-up continues. As far as we know, we are COVID-19 free, but we are cautious.

Personally - I'm loving the serenity, and as an almost-hermit anyway, things haven't changed all that much for me. I haven't succumbed to any crazy urges to clean the house, although I'm attempting to get out and weed the garden a bit more. Unfortunately the mosquito population is as healthy as ever. Mini "nature walks" at home have yielded some interesting things, and the armchair birding has been fruitful.

A good deal of my usual "spare" time is being gobbled up by an imaginary dog called Elvis, whose adventures in Lockdown Land have been airing on the local radio once a week. A twenty minute program takes me a full day to write, although I hope I'll get quicker as the pandemic rolls along.

Elvis the Lockdown Dog

I've realised how often I touch my face without even thinking, I'm sure my hands have actually changed colour and I don't think the end of my nose has ever been so itchy.

We live in weird times. Come for a walk in the garden.

Common Bronzewing, looking anything but common.

Red-browed finch

King Parrots

 

Rainbow Lorikeet

Crimson Rosella

 

Brown Thornbills

Satin Bowerbirds

Australian Wood ducks

Welcome Swallows

Emu - yes, really!

Boredom? Not a chance! Well, not so far, anyway. 

After the Fire 6 - The Silence of the Bush

Near Betka Beach. 3 weeks post-fire. Smoke haze has hidden the ocean in the background

 The bush was never meant to be silent

The trill, squawk or chatter of birdsong, the buzz and twang of insects, the reptilian rustle in piles of leaves, the sudden thud thud and crackle of wallabies or roos fleeing through undergrowth – the bush is usually a noisy place. To walk through the bush with only the crunch of your own shoes and the sound of your own breath in your ears is an unsettling experience. It’s devastating to creep along silent trails that were once so familiar and that rang with life. 

Even worse - the trees, those solid, dependable guardians of the paths and trails, may be absent or unrecognisable. Familiar landmark trees have become unfamiliar, if they're there at all. Sometimes it’s worse, somehow, to recognise them - old friends unclothed, blackened, crippled or felled. That big tree out near the Pony Club – a Grey fantail scolded me once from a branch that is no longer there, and there I watched a pair of Spotted pardalotes harvesting lerps. That empty space overhead, near the water storage facility, is where a pair of Mistletoe birds enchanted me in the spring, and the Eagle Tree behind my house - a tall skeleton that provided an excellent lookout spot for raptors - has been completely obliterated. Gone without a trace.

It's not without a an eerie, pared-back beauty but it's not how it's supposed to be.

The stark black lines of a charcoaled melaleuca forest thrusting upwards from silvery ash-covered ground 

The bush, however, is full of surprises. The regrowth of vegetation is almost magical.  Buds and shoots are bursting through blackened bark. Insects are returning. The birds that eat insects are returning. With the birds comes the birdsong. It's happening, slowly but surely - resurrection in action.

Tree ferns sprouting on Genoa Road

Grass trees re-emerging

Epicormic buds sprout differently on different types of trees – some appear in random clumps, others like the even fuzz along the length of a man’s arm, so that they look a bit like large furry pipecleaners - and still others appear to encircle a trunk in a delicate spiral pattern.

When Banksia cones burn, the seed casings open like golden mouths to spit out the seeds of their rebirth.

Swathes of burnt bush add layers of colour across the landscape in broad strokes of umber, gold, rust, sepia and deep black. Burnt vegetation has more subtleties of colour than you can imagine, and I’m pretty sure there are more than fifty shades of brown.

The beautiful Betka River

The spicy smell of regenerating bush – that warm eucalyptus scent with just a hint of smoke behind it - is actually exquisite, especially if there’s a waft of morning dampness to give it a bit of tang.  It's enough to put a smile on anybody's face. 

After the Fire 3 - A tiny miracle

In the midst of the chaos, the bickering, the anger, the grief – a tiny flicker of light.

A couple of days after the New Year fire in Mallacoota, birds of all kinds began to wash up on the beaches. Here’s a link to one of the news stories about it. Not for the faint-hearted.

I’m so glad I wasn’t here to see that.

Last Saturday morning I went for my first beach walk with my friend Jenny. We walked  through the charred remains of bushland that surrounded Betka Beach…

…through evidence of heat so intense that it split and sliced rocks…

                     ...so intense that it shattered the men’s toilet and melted the paper holder.

And down on the beach we discovered a tiny miracle. Two tiny miracles, in fact, running gaily about on the beach with their devoted parents. Look closely!

(Photo by Leonie Daws. Used with permission)

Why is this so miraculous? Because the Hooded plover (Thinornis rubricollis) struggles each year to survive. Its declining numbers reflect its annual struggle to overcome overwhelming odds. It’s endangered. It’s a beach-nesting bird and its breeding season coincides with the height of our tourist season.  Vulnerable chicks are routinely trampled – often by dogs – or taken by predators. They lose their eggs in king tides and storms. They lay clutch after clutch after clutch, often futilely. Their pluck and perseverance are magnificent.

This year the horrifying fires cut short the tourist season. The beaches are almost deserted. Perhaps many of the Hoodies’ regular predators perished in the fires. But somehow during the fire – as the bush around them burned to ash, as the rocks split, as birds in their thousands perished from smoke or heat or exhaustion from their escape attempts – our little Hoodie parents sat steadfastly on the eggs that produced these chicks. Hunkered down in the sand, they must have been low enough to avoid the worst of the choking smoke, sheltered by the natural undulations of the sand.

My point here is that the Hooded plover is possibly one of Mallacoota’s most vulnerable creatures – and yet it survived this.

To me, it’s a symbol of great optimism against almost insurmountable odds. That’s something we all need at this awful time, as the hard slog of recovery begins.