Well this is not really going the way I had imagined or indeed hoped it would. I'd envisioned an account of the dedicated Kestrel parents striving to raise three vigorous offspring; that idea took a dent when the third and presumably weakest chick disappeared from the nest. And today there's no point sugar-coating it: when …
Recently we had a couple of days' rain and wind which prevented me from visiting the nest site. I figured it would be a good thing to give the poor harassed parents a break from my sticky beaking (pun totally intended). But when yesterday dawned beautiful and clear, I hotfooted it up there to have …
While waiting for signs that the Kestrels were working on raising a family in the Block of Flats, I witnessed a few skirmishes in what seemed to be a serious territorial dispute. And it wasn't the other residents of the Block who were the aggressors, but a bunch of Currawongs -- the pied variety (Strepera …
Spring is in the process of springing: the magpies are engaging in aerial flirtations, the grey fantails are displaying, and today I snapped a new bird for my list, the tiny Spotted Pardalote, busily engaged in collecting nesting material. But with these hopeful signs, it seems the local raptors' habits are changing. This isn't based …
If there's one thing you get used to by the time you reach my ripe old age, it's being making errors. Being mistaken, getting the wrong end of the stick, failure to comprehend -- I've had a wealth of opportunities to do all these things. Let's avoid all the truisms about failure being the path …
Sometimes guesswork and baseless supposition turns out to be true. When I surmised the other day that momma Willie was sitting a bit higher in the nest than usual, and that the bits of fluff around the edge of the nest might signal that the eggs had hatched, this turns out to be the case! …
Hey, I’ve missed you too. January steamed by really fast and although various things happened, in the way things do, none found themselves onto these pages. I have a couple of half-written, rather uninspired pieces that may well make their way here eventually, but they had nothing of the excitement that gets them over the …
You know, through the long, sweaty Singapore years, cooped up in our high-rise apartment, we often talked in a misty-eyed fashion about a golden future in which we’d have a garden. It would be an elegant, well-groomed, peaceful place, with gently tinkling rills, shady trees, lush lawns and rank upon rank of fragrant roses, peonies, …
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