A couple of our resident frogs got very excited by the rain we had on the night of November 16. We didn’t see them at it but we heard a lot of ecstatic croaking in the night and discovered a large mass of eggs floating in a bucket of rain water next morning.
Category: Gardening
Native Monstera
Ambling along the MAMU skywalk I was surprised to see a Monstera growing wild. It had to be a Monstera – nothing else has a flower, or fruit, or leaves, quite like that – but it wasn’t the Monstera deliciosa I grew and wrote about a few years ago, so what was it?
Bridal Veil fungus
The Wet season has arrived, with thunderstorms and brief downpours of 20 – 50 mm or more, and the natural world is responding to the combination of heat and moisture as it always does. Fungi, in particular, are emerging in numbers and varieties we haven’t seen since … well, our visit to the Daintree, actually, but we haven’t seen them here since last Wet season.
Some fungi are weirder than others, and some names are more risible than others. This one wins on both counts.
A visitation of figbirds
Figbirds (Sphecotheres vieilloti) are rowdy gregarious fruit-eaters which visit our garden quite often – not for the fruit they are named for, because we haven’t got any big fig trees, but for the palm seeds.
A large group turned up a few days ago to feed on the Alexandra palm and stayed long enough to be photographed. Long enough, in fact, for a Bowerbird to join them and then wander off again.
Adult females and the young of both sexes are brownish with speckled bellies and grey eye-rings. Adult males are colourful, their red eye-ring and vivid yellow belly contrasting brilliantly with their olive-green back and black head. Young males grow through a transitional stage in which all the adult colours gradually show through the camouflage.
Bananas – nature and nurture
Six years ago I rescued some suckers from a neglected South Townsville garden and planted them in my own. Two years ago I rescued some more when we moved house, to plant them in my new garden. This week I found myself with a bunch from the original (still neglected) patch and a bunch from my new patch, and here they are, side by side.
