Every garden really needs a water source for wildlife – it’s important not just for frogs, but insects, birds and lizards – Happy Earth
A couple of years after putting the pond in my garden there were no frogs in sight, so I got some motorbike frog tadpoles (Litoria moorei) at the end of October last year to move things along.
My friend has frogs hopping here, there and everywhere in her two garden ponds (one with a waterfall!?) but the frogs never had tadpoles. Every spring she would get motorbike frog tadpoles through the Frog Watch tadpole exchange program. Tadpoles shouldn’t be transported far from their parents to limit the spread of disease (chytrid fungus). My friend lives three suburbs from me, the furthest taddies should be transported on the Swan Coastal Plain. (In the Hills they should only be transported two suburbs away.)
Sheeba the dog died three weeks ago, 11 December 2010. She had a malignant mast cell tumour on her leg. She was only sick for a week before I had her put down, but after the infection on the tumour improved she was back to running around for a few days, just not quite as much as b4. Unfortunately we didn’t go for one last sk8, bike ride or beach trip together, but there were a few tennis balls to chase. And I let her sleep her last night on my bed.
Update: I often mix up Banksia attenuata and acorn banksia which I did with the photo of a black cockie eating a banksia cone. Just because they both start with A doesn’t mean they are the same!?
Once upon a time, Black Cockatoos flew in vast flocks, bright tail feathers flashing, calling to each other as they gathered to feed and roost. Just 50 years ago, these unique birds were so plentiful their flocks would blacken the sky. But not anymore.
I love hearing the raucous cries of black cockatoos as they fly over my house or when I see them laughing at the top of tuarts in the park or ripping pine cones to pieces at Curtin University. With all these sightings of my favourite bird, you might think there are lots of them, but sadly Carnaby’s Black Cockatoos (Calyptorhynchus latirostris) are an endangered species [1].
My friends’ bush block is the best place to see black cockatoos. They have a garden of banksias and other native plants surrounding a bird bath. Although there’s more often honey eaters, wattlebirds and blue wrens, every now and then a flock of black cockies comes down for a drink and a chat about the weather. It’s said that black cockies fly over when it’s going to rain [2]. This probably came about because black cockies migrate from the Wheatbelt east of Perth where they breed, to the Swan Coastal Plain in autumn to winter along the coast [3].
My writing and photos on this blog have a Creative Commons license. This means anyone can copy and reuse them, as long as they attribute my work to me. Consider using a Creative Commons license for work you create. There are six licenses allowing different levels of reuse. Creative Commons relies on supporters to continue their work. Make a donation during Creative Commons’ annual fundraising campaign.
Writer Robin Sloan had this to say about why he uses Creative Commons for his work.
Robin Sloan
I’m a writer you probably haven’t heard of. But if I’m right about Creative Commons, and about the way books and culture work — and if I’m a little bit lucky — then your kids will read my stuff. And their kids too.
Just about a year ago, I used a site called Kickstarter to gather a posse of patrons and, in the span of about two months, wrote and published a short novel. It featured a character named Annabel Scheme, a sort of Sherlock Holmes for the 21st century.
After it was finished, I mailed the books off to my backers — about a thousand copies, total — and then put the PDF online, for free, with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 license.
Often, that’s where this story ends. Triumph! Success! Righteous sharing! Right?
Update 19 Jan: The link to a copy of my letter from the black and red pic is now fixed and you can download it to amend and send your own letter.
Last Wednesday the environment program Understory on RTRfm radio interviewed WWF’s Southwest Australia Policy Officer Katherine Howard about a land clearing proposal at Perth Airport in Jandakot [1]. The Airport’s owner Jandakot Airport Holdings (JAH) is the second owner of a 50 year lease since privatisation a decade ago [2]. Their clearing proposal is detailed in Jandakot Airport Expansion – EPBC Reference 2009/4796 [3] and includes bushland home to three endangered species:
While 40% of the proposed area is designated for a fourth runway and extension of the other runways, the other 96ha is earmarked for Jandakot City, a development which would be largest homewares complex in the southern hemisphere [1] (they must want to compete with the biggest ikea in the southern hemisphere that killed my fav swamp). WWF provide a simple breakdown of the areas proposed for clearing [4]. JAH have previously cleared 79ha of banksia woodland for a commercial precinct and there is dispute whether this was done with appropriate authority and permission. Currently 90% of this development is vacant [5].
The whole point of introducing an emissions trading scheme is to make sure that polluting industries phase out and are replaced with cleaner alternatives, renewable energy and energy efficiency programmes. [1]
While the Australian Federal opposition dithers on passing the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) legislation which would enable carbon trading, Australia’s weather gets hotter and hotter.
The Bureau of Meteorology’s Annual Australian Climate Statement for 2009 noted last year was Australia’s second warmest year since high-quality records began in 1910 and the past decade was the warmest on record.
I was planning to blog about the field of lettuce growing in my garden, but that thesis took over and since then it’s become a field of lettuce and tomato, with lettuce getting pretty dismal and tomato in ascendency. A month ago when it was just a lettuce field, I gave one to my neighbour and he said it was so much tastier than shop bought lettuce and what did I do to make them grow so well? I was at a loss for words. I don’t think “water them every day” was the answer he was looking for. Then I realised what it was.
I love it when mushrooms pop up in my garden but now winter’s over there’ll be no more until next year. I like looking through my friend’s copy of The Magical World of Fungi by Patricia Negus [1], to ID fungi I come across. Although it may be the drawing of a fairy sitting on a mushroom on the last page which makes me love this book. A Flickr friend told me about the Perth Fungi Field Book [2] which is free to download, so I had my own ID source. I had lots of fun IDing fungi I found and not so much fun realising how difficult it can be to ID fungi.
Fungi species often appear slightly different in different regions. [2]
In August I found some very unusual mushrooms growing in the pine bark mulch of my native garden. They had pointed caps which were intricately crenulated. I’ve had mushrooms with “ordinary” caps popping up in my lawn or vegie garden, but never something quite so alien-looking. The Perth Fungi Field Book came to the rescue and identified them as edible black morels (Morchella elata), not native to Australia, thus like the weed growing behind it, messing up my “native” garden. The name confused me at first because the morels in my garden weren’t black until they started dying, but after picking one to give to my brother to eat, it turned black inside the crenulations.
This is not a sad tale because the hose wept. The hose’s function is to weep, due to the holes punctured in intervals along its length. It’s connected to the drainage hole at the bottom of my rainwater tank and on days when there’s no rain in sight, I turn it on for 20 minutes to water one of my vegie garden beds. The sad part of this tale happened this morning. I went out to turn it on, finding to my horror that it already was and had been weeping for twenty four hours! If only its sobs were louder, I would have ended those wasted tears.
I like to blame Sheeba the dog for any problem in the garden. She’s the culprit when freshly dug holes are concerned, but I don’t think she’s quite mastered turning a tap. The culprit in this instance is my brain on thesis. Zoë S. drew an anatomically correct diagram of this phenomenon. As you can see the (red) area of brain left for accomplishing tasks like turning on and off taps at the correct time is very small, thus it’s amazing such a water crisis hasn’t happened before.
A day ago there was about 1200L in the tank, now there’s 300L. The bean seeds that I bemoaned were taking so long to pop up; all have now thanks to the generous soaking. I wondered if 900L would be enough for their whole life, but I have a feeling it doesn’t work like that. The tomato seedlings I just planted in the very sunny other vegie bed got none of this soaking, which they needed – stupid weeping hose. Why do you do everything wrong!?
Last year my rainwater tank was installed at about this time. I didn’t think I’d have a tank of water til winter this year, but the unusual spring downpours filled it before summer. It would be nice if the same huge amount of rain fell this November, but I’m not counting on it. No more rainwater to drink this summer :(
And cause it hasn’t rained the pond really needs a bucket or two of non-chlorinated water right now – stupid rain, stupid hose, stupid thesis!
I hate mowing, so I’ve been getting rid of lawn and replacing it with garden beds for vegies and native plants. There’s still a bit of lawn so mowing is still a chore.
daisies flowering after mowing the verge
Last year I got a push mower and mowing became so much easier. At first it took a longer time, but because I wasn’t pushing a heavy power mower, it wasn’t such hard work. Unfortunately long grass is difficult to mow with a push mower, so you have mow regularly. In winter this means every two weeks. I didn’t think this would happen with me, but after having a hell of a time with the long grass sometime in August, I’ve been mowing every second weekend. Due to the grass not being too long (and the small amount of lawn) it only takes five or ten minutes.
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived"
– Henry David Thoreau (1854)
about ClareSnow
I'm a librarian, but my first love was science and as a kid I wanted to be an ecologist or botanist. Things got in the way and now I only "study" nature in my spare time. As the lazyst environmentalyst I write about what I do to try to ensure the nature of our world is still here for future generations.
"We live in the era of copying, the era when restricting copying is a fool's errand, and 'by CC' gives me an artistic framework to embrace copying rather than damning it."
– Cory Doctorow, 2007.
Every garden really needs a water source for wildlife – it’s important not just for frogs, but insects, birds and lizards – Happy Earth
I was planning to blog about the field of lettuce growing in my garden, but 
This is not a sad tale because the hose wept. The hose’s function is to weep, due to the holes punctured in intervals along its length. It’s connected to the drainage hole at the bottom of my rainwater tank and on days when there’s no rain in sight, I turn it on for 20 minutes to water one of my vegie garden beds. The sad part of this tale happened this morning. I went out to turn it on, finding to my horror that it already was and had been weeping for twenty four hours! If only its sobs were louder, I would have ended those wasted tears.
Last year my rainwater tank 
Delicious
