Part Ten: We enjoyed the DRY!

Wurrgeng season is coming to a close and the exceptionally cold recent weather has produced a wonderful flowering and fruiting period. Tomatoes, other vegetables and herbs exulted in the coolness and complete lack of humidity, and produced a bumper crop.

The new season, the hot, dry Gurrung, extending from mid-August to the end of September, is the tough season, and the brilliant cloudless days find many animals tucking themselves away into the cool shade and damp undergrowth, sometimes just to get away from the smoke haze! It is their health spa/holiday resort time!

Many of the monsoon forest trees produce their flowers and fruits at this time. Just over my back fence, there is a small tree with a huge bunch of the parasitic mistletoe plant swarming over it. The red and black berries attract the appropriately named mistletoe bird, enticing them to come and feast on these juicy items. These small birds replicate the colours of the berries with their glossy blue-black heads and backs, and brilliant red and white underparts, and are often hard to spot amongst the berries and foliage. These birds are known as "flower peckers", but they thrive on the mistletoe berries which pass rapidly through their digestive system. The still viable, sticky seed is then deposited onto a suitable branch and is very quick to germinate. It is not long before another parasitic mistletoe bunch is helping to take over the whole tree.

These attractive birds are often mistaken for crimson (or blood) finches, and the fairly common red-headed finch.

The colourful grass finches, such as the star and crimson finches, are "sometime" visitors as they really prefer the savannah and open grassland close to watercourses. But the double-barred and the pretty little yellow-beaked masked finch seem to be quite at home flitting around in my nearly leafless "green ant" tree, and pecking in the grass under the frangipani tree in the communal parkland.

This dry, windy weather brings the most stress to my deciduous tree, and the grassed area of my backyard is soon awash and littered with falling red and autumn-coloured leaves.

Should I rake them up? Why bother – tomorrow there will be just as many to replace them! A lawn mower/mulcher once a week is a much better option. Is it any wonder that I decided on a "pot-plant" moveable garden as otherwise the garden beds would be smothered by tough, indestructible, irretrievable, leathery leaves?

In amongst these pot plants, the quirky little tata lizards, who wave bye-bye before they sprint off to the nearest concealment, are normally diurnal, but at this hot time they usually revert to night hunting. One such, a young tata, lives amongst the shaded pot plants on the edge of my patio, sharing the space with diminutive green tree frogs and a large, possessive marbled frog.

The small, black pompom I own gently noses the frogs back into their hidey-holes if they venture inside the house or onto the open grass. They need protection from the peewees and other bird predators who are partial to a bit of green frog entrée.

Next month: Water Wise