Weather Observations – 29/10/13

The weather has not changed much since September. It’s still been hot, dry and sunny – summer has come early this year. Flies have been multiplying like crazy and our house has been temporarily overrun by them.
Bush fires have been burning through most of my home state with a couple of big ones located about an hours drive from my house. The skies have been filled with smoke ever since my birthday week (17th Oct). Thankfully we haven’t been threatened by any bush fires; my thoughts go out to all those who have been or are.
The sun is hot and burns the skin very easily.

Many of the ducks have been producing ducklings (daww) and surprisingly a majority of the ducklings I saw in May have survived and are looking like gangly teenagers now.

The ocean has been bitterly cold for the last few months but about a week or two ago had clearly warmed up – could this be changing tides?
Whales have also been migrating up and down the coast for the last few months… I haven’t seen any.
Dead mutton birds have also been appearing on the sand at the beach due to their long migration home. I’ve found a couple of alive ones who were clearly too exhausted to move on (they allowed me to pick them up). In this instance it’s hard to know what to do. I felt sorry for the birds but wasn’t sure if saving them now would really do them any good – they’ll just die next migrating season won’t they? I moved them into a nice shady area where they could peacefully die. I felt like that was the right thing to do.

As usual the magpies chicks are leaving their nests and we’re seeing extremely territorial behaviour from them. I’ve not experienced a swooping this year but I think they’re used to me (I feed them sometimes).

Weather Observations: September

The weather has been really dry and sunny for the last 5 weeks. Lots of birds and bees.
Temperatures have been getting quite high and the fire season started a lot earlier this year.
The last week or two has been very sporadic with the wind picking up at around 3pm.
Daylight savings started last weekend (and now I’m all disorientated haha).

Weather Observations – 19/8/13

It’s been a wet spring – it hasn’t necessarily been raining but there’s been a lot of moisture in the air. The plants have been loving it. Majority of days have been sunny and quite warm late morning to early afternoon. Nights have been cold with fog and frost sometimes making an appearance.

About 2 weeks ago I saw a big group of Jellyfish in the river that I regularly cross to get into Sydney. I kept my eye out for them again last week and I couldn’t see any of them – was that their seasonal breeding time? Brian says he’s observed a similar group quite a few years back when he went for a holiday on the river during the summer months.

The birds have been pretty loud and fussy for the last 3 weeks as well. I’ve seen nests appearing in the tops of trees.

The wind has also picked up a bit on a few days – it’s a warm wind that seems to circle around (instead of coming from one location). This reminds me of a spring about 3 years ago when it was so windy that all the wattle trees had their yellow flowers blown off – they all sat in little yellow fluffy piles on the road.

The wattle is still out now though and hasn’t been effected by the wind much. Although it did only hang around for a day or two.

Weather Observations – 21/5/13

A Mother duck and her ducklings.

It has taken a little longer than expected to get into the Winter mode. The warmer weather seems to have motivated some animals to reproduce – as far as I know I thought ducks only had ducklings during the Spring (so that they could raise their young whilst it was warm and there was more food around). During one of my runs I spotted a Mother duck with quite a few ducklings following her around.

It has been sunny during the day but not very warm. The temperature tends to drop pretty quickly once the sun sets and stays low until it rises again. I haven’t seen much fog though.

We have been having on and off rain – it began after the April floods. It started as a week rain/sprinkle then a week of sun and since then we have been seeing sun more often (with maybe a day or two of rain every few weeks).

Weather Observations – April

For the last few years the first week in April rains non-stop with more rain on and off either side of that week. This year the rains (and the floods – always the floods) came around a little later than expected and didn’t last as long.
We were experiencing Summer-like warmth right up into late April.

I remember back in about September last year there being a lot more wattle than usual blooming. I believe that the longer the wattles bloom and how many actually bloom could be an indicator of how hot and how long the Summer will be.
Will have to observe this over the next few years to be able to test my theory.

I’ve also moved so haven’t been able to keep track of the animals as much as what I would like.

30/1/13 – Weather observations

Today we harvested our corn – they’re so sweet! We waited until the ‘hair’ was a black colour (but I think we could have waiting a little longer for a couple of them). Definitely a success.

For the last day or so it’s been storming – we had rain for a couple of days before that but then it turned into more wind and scary looking clouds than actual rain.
Today the clouds cleared and we’re back to being sunny again.

24/1/13 – Weather Observations

The last week or so has been hot and humid. We’ve had very gusty winds and a light sprinkle of rain on and off for the last couple of days. There was also fog the other morning – could we be heading into autumn already?

The corn we’re growing is about ready to harvest and all the other plants we’re growing have been absolutely loving the change in weather. My lemon balm died in the heat and the bean plant seems to have a disease brought on by the hot weather (we’ll need to plant it earlier in the season I think).

There’s this one bird in the tree outside our bedroom window and it’s been quite active lately – I have no idea what it’s name is though. I found two of it’s feathers yesterday while I was weeding (it seems to be following me). Another sunny morning – before the rains were blown in again – we woke up to the sound of what sounded like 5 kookaburra’s laughing right outside our window! When it was a reasonable hour I went out to find them all mucking around in the gum tree next to the jetty (the same one I sat under the other day). There are still baby magpie’s following their parents making a racket – admittedly not as much as when they were younger but I honestly think they’re getting too old to still be trying to scab food off their parents (it’s been months since they hatched). Have seen them further down the road though so they’re getting themselves out there. They still come around looking for food here but I’ve decided to stop feeding them because we’re moving soon and I don’t want them freaking out the new people or the new people doing something stupid.