Life and Wildlife on the Banks of the Murrumbidgee
When I look at our big remnant eucalypts I have often wondered how old they are. For many of them, they could be anywhere from one hundred to five hundred years old. Some types of trees I know to be much younger, particularly the ones I planted myself, or were planted by someone I know... Continue Reading →
My wonderful farm assistant Dmitry Grishin is doing a study on water in the soil at the Australian National University. To do it, he's setting up sampling points all over both of the farms and measuring the penetration of rainfall. Initially we didn't have any rainfall (horrible dry season), but in the last couple of... Continue Reading →
Since the end of the drought there has been a spate of sheep and cattle thefts ("duffing") particularly by thieves using empty caravans to stuff suddenly valuable animals into. It's suspicious if an apparent grey nomad has a trailer that bleats or moos. That's not the sort of stock-taking I'm doing. With my mother's death,... Continue Reading →
We have some beautiful beetles here, and some that annoy me by eating trees that I would like to have survive, but I'd never paid much attention to the little black beetles that crawl around on the ground. Then in March we had a visit from Kip Will from UC Berkeley who was interested in carabid... Continue Reading →
Our lovely neighbour Cathy Campbell has a new project. It's called "Managing Mange in the Mullion" (that's the title of the Facebook group also) and involves counting wombats, working out how many of them are affected by sarcoptic mange and treating them using "burrow flaps" that deliver a dose of medicine automatically at the entry to... Continue Reading →
This year the grand finale of our tree linkage project was not even on our own land. To complete the 3.9 kilometres (2.4 miles) of small plots that will allow birds like diamond firetails (stagonopleura guttata) and speckled warblers (chthonicola sagittata) to move around the landscape, we planted a larger area at the edge of... Continue Reading →
Last autumn we planted up five mini enclosures to provide protection for small native birds and to re-establish a corridor from the Mullion Creek down to the Murrumbidgee River. It turned out to be a great way to get a lot of connection done without a massive amount of time spent planting. At the time... Continue Reading →
Once upon a time, a scientist was interested in the physiology and adaptability of Australian snowgums. The official name of snowgums is eucalyptus pauciflora because they have only a few flowers (not because their flowers are crummy). In the mountains they're known for their twisted shapes and striped trunks. They're the highest... Continue Reading →
One Bend In The River 