Retired, living with wife, daughter and grandkids on a lifestyle block just out of Kaukapakapa, Auckland, New Zealand, working harder than most other times of my life.
We have 100 sheep, including 37 ewes. two rams and 61 lambs along with a flock of 39 laying hens.
I have a wilderness garden where I am propagating a few trees, vines, shrubs and a very few vegetables.
The garden/orchard means that I must continually trap possums or they will eat everything just before it is ripe enough to pick.
Tonight the moon is nearly at full moon and was visible in the early evening sky. When I went out onto the deck to check on it I discovered that there was a feint rainbow over the moon. I have never seen this before.
Right near the far right end of the rainbow there is a tiny speck that is a Welcome Swallow, flying high in the sky, hawking for insects. Amazingly these tiny birds fly at about thirty miles per hour, with their mouth gaping open, and catching insects!
I have been waiting for a Kereru, our native wood pigeon, to come and eat the freshly sprouted leaves on a Poplar tree close by our deck, so that I could capture some good photos and videos of these beautiful birds, at close quarters. On Monday one of them complied. He was very wary of me taking his photograph and spent half his time eyeing me and the other half perched precariously on a tiny branch that swayed up and down in the wind and with every movement he made when eating.
I am in the midst of transferring my account to another Mastodon instance, at
I am not able to post much these days but I still like to share the beauty of nature around me on our little farm, which I feel is a privilege to enjoy.
I'm not sure how to go about posting from this new account.
Ready to make the change over but unsure how.
Yesterday I discovered a #downed #pine #tree over three fences, and decided to try and clean it up today, as fine weather was forecast.
So this afternoon I collected my equipment and headed down to survey the site and see what I could do.
It was a straight forward job, as the log was almost on the ground, with few branches.
I only made one mistake, that of getting the #chainsaw bar jammed near the bottom of the log, but fortunately had another bar with which to extricate it.'
Here's a snippet of a video of the kite, flying at the limit of the line.
I found that it was best standing quite a bit down the windward side of the ridge as there was an updraught there, to carry the kite aloft. Otherwise, as the kite reached the descending air on the lee side of the ridge, it would lose height and then enter quieter air and drop down to the ground.
I enjoyed about ten minutes of flying the kite in nearly ideal conditions before packing it in for the day.
Earlier in the day I recorded the wind blowing through the trees close to the house. I didn't think that the wind was particularly strong as it can sound much louder than this, like a freight train going past, and that is when the ground is littered with leaves and branches that have been torn off by the wind. Hence I was a little surprised to find a tree down.
Today has had high winds and when I went down to feed the chooks I discovered that a mature pine tree had been blown over, falling over three deer-netting fences, but fortunately missing wooden structures where the damage would have been more difficult to repair.
After feeding the chooks and taking photos of the fallen tree, I went up a ridge line in the hill paddock where I could get a steady wind and fly my kite for a while.
I have been a keen observer of the moon for a long while and taken quite a few photos of its various phases.
Tonight I did some research on how the various phases of the moon appear at different degrees of latitude and found some interesting information that anyone can check for their own location.
I have downloaded a couple of videos that show,for North and South, the changing face of he moon for 2023 and set them side by side. link to come.
The past few days have been rather bleak, with cloudy, wet weather. Last night there was a little break in this pattern with almost clear skies, allowing me to see the new crescent moon for the first time, about sunset,
I recorded about a quarter of an hour of the sunset, with my cellphone set on time-lapse, resulting in a file of 65M. I have managed to reduce this to 1.7M using FFmpeg to scale to 2/3rds and convert to a .webm file format.