Weekly Bits 'n' Piece

Last weekend we went to 'Love Living Locally', a community gathering to celebrate Harmony Day and local, sustainable living. The snowflakes did some cooking, designed and made peace flags, watched fruit smoothies being prepared by people power (ie, a blender hooked up to a stationery bike), sampled Ethiopian bread, discovered worm farms, watched me trying out iDance2 (heaps of fun - I could have played it for hours!), and spent lots of time on the jumping castle.

Now that the longer nights are closing in, it's a good time for those night time sorties to look for wildlife. We pulled out the deliciously warm scarves knitted by Nanna, and rugged the snowflakes up. There were wallabies, potaroos, bandicoots and possums hopping, climbing and scuttling about - oh, and of course Strawberry the chook, who has taken up the habit of roosting on the outdoor table so that she can startle  us by peering unexpectedly in through the kitchen window with her beady eyes inches from our faces -, although the cooler weather seems to have reduced frog and insect activity in the evenings. The only difficulty, is getting the children to actually keep quiet enough to get near the creatures, but they're improving with practice. Later this week, #1 and #2 will be heading further afield in search of quolls.

On the subject of wildlife, we have a visitor this week: a magnificent white goshawk. These are quite rare - there are about 110 breeding pairs in Tasmania - so we are lucky to be able to get a good look at one. Unfortunately, it managed to polish off four of our half grown chicks before we realised and got the rest of them safely locked up out of reach. Still, it's all a learning experience for the snowflakes: although they were sad to see the chicks gone, they were able to understand that we can't blame the goshawk, since it's just a predator hunting for a tasty meal and taking whatever it can catch most easily. Next on the agenda is a larger and better chook run so that we can keep the chooks shut up in more spacious quarters.