Bird hide

As promised I took a few pics of the bird hide. Still a work in progress by the looks of it as Neil has added a curtain to block out the backlight from the door.

It is certainly lovely to sit there and enjoy the view even if you are not a birder like myself who cannot tell a crow from an ostrich.

As you walk into the arboretum you get a glimpse of the hide through the trees so you know where to go

and as you approach it along the winding path it shows itself in all its splendour

It is a good height above the vegetation and one can spot the birds over quite a large area

Another nice view is from the aloe/cycad patch, kind of mysterious looking.

Now if we only could allow ourselves the time to sit there for a good while instead of work, work, work.

Further this Wednesday a very much needed cleanout of the misting house was done, which prompted much planting and weeding of the shade house. Soon we also need to start moving things from there into the general nursery and do lots of weeding in there as well. After tea it was time for Keith and I to do some more chain sawing to clean up the pine tree while the ladies did some planting and much needed weeding in the entrance circle. Tough going in the heat and the horseflies were still a menace. I can’t remember them ever being that bad for such a long time.

Pottaman in the meanwhile did some more flattening of the cycle tracks, we need to ride it ourselves soon to see what it is like now and we bribed him with a chocolate cake to make haste with the mowing of the sections of the new trail. We’ll see next week whether it has worked.

We also checked up on the blue gums, there is some resprouting, nothing we can’t control though. Hopefully some of the stacks can be burned soon to clean some of the branches up.

Lastly we also found this strange stick insect in the arboretum