[first published 08.03.2025 Substack]
The highlight, for me, of these autumnal days (Southern hemisphere!) is the late afternoon moment when the small birds come to splash in the… bird bath / pond / mosquito habitat? I’m not sure what to call it as it’s not as ornamental as ‘bird bath’ implies and it aint natural like ‘pond’ suggests. It’s a square heavy-duty black plastic tub – a feed container for livestock (I’m guessing) bought years ago from the rural co-op store, to serve as a the concrete-filled base for a sculpture that found its feet some other way – plonked amongst the long strappy leaves of the dianella in viewing distance from the side door.
Maybe ‘highlight’ seems like the wrong word to apply to watching little birds flutter up some water on a quiet afternoon. It sounds a bit twee! But hearing them gather in the trees close-by – the spine bills, scrub wrens, blue wrens, yellow robins, red-browed finches, fantails and flycatchers – speaking softly to each other, I want to take up my spot on the veranda and get ready to sit still and quiet for as long as they’re happy to bathe and preen. Their swiftness makes me smile without thinking about it. Their small hierarchies make me laugh without analysing why. My mind is quiet and they are delightful, for that small window before night falls (earlier and earlier and earlier).
I watched a short clip of Jackie the bald eagle feeding her two chicks, caught on a webcam set up in Big Bear Valley, San Bernardino, California (courtesy of Austin Kleon’s substack, which I recommend for general art, writing, music, sanity links) and it’s the best six minutes of screen time I’ve enjoyed in some time. Way better than any screen time spent on the Mukbezumps!
That brings me to the wasps and the slime.
The veranda mentioned above, as prime bird-bathing vantage point, has been requisitioned by paper wasps. It’s my own fault; like when the kids used to ask to stay up a just bit longer to watch TV and you say – okay, but just this once! Those damn paper wasps came back to their nesting spots this summer, even though we’d removed the old nests, which were surprisingly sturdy, for things made out of chewed up wood and wasp spit. Back they came and started building their little hexagonal creches and we hesitated when we should’ve said ‘No! Not this time!’ and now here we are with four paper wasp nests (a multi-layered fan shaped job under the laundry eaves; an upside-down tree-shaped complex hanging from tough little stumps near the laundry door; a globular blob peeping out from the hood of the barbecue; and a neat little upturned cone filling in the roof of a miniature ornamental birdcage) in the once-peaceful space between me and the plastic tub for birds to play in.
The slime is a more complicated situation. I’m not even sure that ‘slime’ is the right word, because it’s more like a velvety fur that grows over the stone slabs beyond the veranda (between me and the birds, now patrolled by wasps). It sure gets slippery when it’s rain-wet or dewy in the morning or misted or fogged. But when the sun is out the fur feels soft and friendly, not dangerous at all. It’s kind of algae, kind of bacteria, kind of porto-mossy maybe?
It seems to coincide with heat and humidity, stone and water. I hope it’s making lots of oxygen because I’ve given up trying to scrub it away or blast it off with a pressure hose. However, this may not be the time to give up on these efforts as global warming continues and climate change results in “the “poleward” shift of cyclone intensity and the overall increase in cyclone severity” (see Michael Mazengarb’s substack), Cyclone Alfred being an example of this more southerly landfall, happening right this minute.
So yeah, wasps taking over my nice quiet spot to sit and watch the birds and slippery black goober-fuzz growing on the back steps – these are nothing to fret over, in contrast to the fierce weather up north and the Mukbezumps in the US driver’s seat wreaking their own kind of – apparently gleeful – havoc.
Bring on the small daily highlights – delightful and harmless.