It was too hot to do anything yesterday afternoon, so I sprawled under the ceiling fan and
When I lived in Townsville, one of the cafes on Flinders Street had sailcloth punkahs. They were effective, picturesque and dropped dead insects in your food at the same rate as rotating fans. If my next place has sufficiently high ceilings, I’ll install a set in the living room. Someone must still make them. Proper ones, that is. Not those fancy palm leaf ones that wouldn’t even stir your hair.
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If I had some cash left over after purchasing the bespoke punkahs, I’d buy a spotting scope and train it permanently on the tallest quandong. The trees here are coming into flower again and it won’t be long before the canopy will be bustling with honeyeaters and lorikeets. Even though there’s a perfectly good quandong right next to the house, the birds prefer the other one. I’m sure if I bought that spotting scope, they’d all shift. The topknot pigeons are the worst. You’ve only got to look at them and they erupt into the sky. It’s like a pigeony Vesuvius but with slightly fewer casualties.
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There is a dead straight line of stinging tree seedlings growing in the driveway — about one every ten metres. A catbird must have stuffed its face and then gone for a bombing run between house and road. I should make it clean up the mess.
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On the subject of birds, the male tooth-billed bowerbird seems to be powering down for the Wet Season. He started calling on 1 October last year and was going strong over Christmas. Now, his singing is much less frequent and not so complex. He is no longer pruning the ginger leaves, so I suppose he has abandoned his arena. I wonder how many tooth-billed bowerbird chicks will hatch this year?
