Non-book post: Spring is here!

Yesterday was our first nice weather day, with a high of 21C (70F) and full sunshine.  We’re still in total lockdown, but the government amended the rules a few weeks ago to allow us to drive to our exercise, as long as it’s within 5km, so I dragged MT out to a new-to-us park known as Willsmere Park or Kew Billabong.  For those who may not know, a billabong is a backwater or stagnant pool, made by water flowing from a main stream or river during a flood. We had no idea it was there until recently, and it’s lovely.  We got there ‘early’ by MT’s standards, a bit later than I wanted to, but in time to have the park to ourselves for about 45 minutes, before everyone else in a 5km radius descended.

I didn’t get a lot of pictures, mostly because we were busy checking out the lay of the land at first, and then, well… people.  But we did chat (at a distance) with a lovely woman for whom the park was obviously her ‘local’, and she pointed out a pair of Tawny Frogmouths sleeping off the day, though one woke up long enough to shuffle his feathers and sun himself for a moment before dozing back off.

She also pointed out a nesting box for a pair of sugar gliders and told us if we were there at dusk we’d have half a chance of seeing them depart the box.  Guess where we’ll be at dusk sooner rather than later?  (Sugar gliders, if you’re unfamiliar with them, are the cutest damn tiny possums that fit in the palm of your hand.)

We’re only allowed to be out a couple of hours a day, and by the time I’d done the circuit there were hoards of people socially distancing, and cyclists trying their hardest to thin the herds (a major bike path goes through the park), so we headed back to the lot in time to see that it wasn’t only the humans enjoying the sunshine and cavorting in the spring weather:

I suspect, if you asked the neighborhood dogs, they’d say that water bowl was for them, but I doubt any of them would try to tell the cockatoos that.