Rest In Peace Rooster!

The other sad news from our flock is that our rooster has suffered a freak (and fatal) accident. We were planning on moving him on after selling his brother at the end of last year. We don't want any further in-breeding in the flock and it's too hard dealing with chicks when the hens won't lay in the hutch anymore. He was a beautiful bird though so I was sure that we'd find a good home for him.

I was therefore really quite sad to flip over the empty fish bin that we use as the sheep's drinking trough and find him underneath. He must have sat on the downhill edge of the bin when it was empty and tipped it over the top of him. It would have been too heavy for him to shift and we wouldn't have heard his crows. I laid him to rest in the bush with the sheep as mourners.

The last sighting

One of our hens produced about 12 chicks at the start of this year. We didn't manage to catch them and so they were left to fend for themselves under the watchful eye of the mother hen. Sadly this was the last we saw of them all together.

The hawk had a feast and a neighbourhood cat was seen on the prowl as well. Two drowned in the water before I had chance to put rocks back in the trough and one got trapped in the chookateria. Disaster!

Just one chick remains and looks fighting fit and (thankfully) female. The frustrating thing is that we probably won't get any eggs from either of them now that they seem to have gone totally feral.

Going to the ram

On the same day as our flametree fell down, "our" sheep were taken away so that they could go to the ram. We'll look forward to seeing their offspring in our paddock towards the end of the year but in the meantime expect to host some rams once they've done their duty.

Canna Lily

The long hot, dry summer may have left most of the garden looking parched but it obviously suited this canna lily. It was my Christmas gift from the swap & trade at our gardening club. I only planted it in December but by the start of February it was flowering beautifully. The magic of sheep pellets?

Second Skin

Here's the golden skin shed by a cicada on one of our remaining flametrees.

In Chinese imagery, a cicada shedding its skin represents the tactic of escaping danger by using deception or the many stages of transformation required of a person before all illusions have been broken and one reaches enlightenment. 

Mulch

And here's a chainsaw gang getting the remains of the tree all tidied away - it was gone by lunchtime. And now we have a huge pile of wood chips ready for the borders.

Timber!!!

 Here's the moment when the flametree was felled.

Fallen

We had a little bit of excitement in mid-February. I heard a gentle scraping or sliding noise and though that it was the peacocks on the roof again but J and my father had both noticed half of our flametree falling onto the drive as if in slow motion. Both of our vehicles were parked beneath the tree but remarkably it just slipped down the back of them, smashing only one tail light.

We'd only been talking about the tree at dinner the night before. A large branch had fallen from it previously and left it a little lopsided. We guessed that its days were numbered but we hadn't appreciated that it would succumb quite so soon!

There was no wind at all and it wasn't particularly humid so the leaves weren't full of water and overweight. There was a smell of rot coming from the cracked trunk though so perhaps it had just had enough. Because flametrees often split low down in the trunk, they're vulnerable to rot at the joint as water can settle there. The two sides of the trunk also grow apart, pushing the other side away until the two are no longer compatible.