The curse of the lilac tree and the loungeroom Starling

I read somewhere, that there is an old wives' tale which says if you put lilac inside the house, it brings death.  Our tree this year has blossomed better than previous years, it's a ripper.  The perfume smacks you in the face when you walk down the driveway.  They keep their fragrance for a little while so I've got bunches and bunches of them in vases and jugs all around the house.  I'm expecting a major massacre any moment now!!  I love to come home to a house filled with fresh flowers.  Particularly now that the garden is offering up new rose buds.  That is, if you can get to them before Possum does.  I've tried putting a net over my favourite rose bush, which unfortunately is also his favourite, but this hasn't been successful.  I can't get the roses out of the netting when I want them and so both me and Possum are denied access.  I just get frustrated with the net and end up pulling their heads off which is not very good at all.  The rose heads that is, not the possums.  Although if he keeps this up, it really will get personal.  People I speak to tell me that at night their gardens are a hub of activity with Quolls, Pademelons (I thought that was some little yellow character from an on line game), Wallabies and Possums, and that eventually they have to fence in and cover everything.  We're lucky not to live that close to bushland or forest because I'd be employing some sort of armed night watch guard if that were the case.  Although we're not prone to any sort of violence here and I was alarmed to come home this week to a dead Starling on the lounge room floor.  With no windows or doors open it's come down from one of our sealed up chimneys where they insist on moving in with their new families.  I couldn't help noticing that it was completely untouched, all feathers intact.  This seemed a bit odd given we had a cat inside at the time.  Then Max appears and without so much of a blink of an eye walks over the dead bird to say hi, nice you're home and feed me now.  He barely even noticed it. We know he's not the predatory kind, but golly, at least pretend you caught it.  Damn those lilacs.

Gruelling

Oh dear!  Fixer upperer anybody?  Not quite.  This is a photo from an historical site in one of Tasmania's former 'female factories' that kept convict women prisoners during the 1800's.  This was a room in what is left of one of the Superintendent's houses which gives a stark look into how hard times were back then (I suddenly don't feel so compelled to wipe down my kitchen bench for a third time today).  This place would have been freezing in winter, being inland with the only source of heating being in this fireplace.  They must have welcomed Spring sunshine even if it didn't belong in such a cold, awful place.  One of the information panels on the walls explains the diet of these women and the rations of food they were given which were mainly bread, gruel and soup, made from meat thickened with vegetables and peas or barley.  I didn't find this at all horrifying.  This prison food whilst not palatable and probably not cooked or prepared with much care was most likely of better nutritional value than a lot of items on our supermarket shelves.  We've got people out there with shopping trolley's full of packaged unknown chemicals, colourings and food additives that if you had put them out on this bench sometime in about 1850, would probably still be ok to eat today.  That's not a good thing by the way.  I worry about where our food comes from and like to have some control over its origins.  Our farm cat Minnie leaves her local catch of dead mice artfully arranged on the back doorstep and whilst I notice this early in the morning, by lunchtime the body has been removed. The chooks love them.  It just scares me a little that this dead mouse has now entered, just slightly into my own food chain..eeewww!!  I'll stop thinking about that now.  Perhaps I need to go and prepare some gruel for dinner.  What is that anyway?

Ready, aim, splat

Ah, Spring!  A welcomed season from blistering cold winds that howled through the gaps in my old front window frames.  Spring means new life and nest building. Unfortunately my house has proven, year on year, to be a reliable host of our new mum and dad Starlings.  Like going back to the same seaside shack every year, they choose the inside of my front verandah roof with the late afternoon sun and a room with a view.  Whilst we've been known to be on the generous side with our own menagerie of bird life that includes a good proportion of bantam chickens and guinea fowls, I draw the line at bratty Starlings that outstay their welcome and crap all over the front of my house.  After a Sunday of washing down windows and removing bird pooh from the entrance of a very old weatherboard house that doesn't deserve such ill mannered treatment, I resorted to the only defence I know that doesn't involve a twelve gauge.  A bird of prey.  Now this little feller came from the hardware shop because apparently they don't sell either real or stuffed ones (to my absolute disappointment) and so with beady bright eyes and a plastic bobble head, he had to do.  So Bobble Head as he is now referred to, was placed on the verandah and told to ward off anyone bird like that refuses to see the sign, no room at the inn.  However unfortunately since Bobble Head was engaged in verandah duties, we've had some serious westerly winds come through which continue to blow him off his verandah perch, down the steps and into the rose bushes.  Initially I didn't want to secure him because the Starlings would wake up to that pretty quick and notice that he doesn't leave his post...'yeah, that old plastic bobble head trick, hah, hah, hah!'  So I went out yesterday to collect poor BH to find him rolling around the porch like he'd been on the sherry all night, and noticed that some brazen Starling had managed to plant one right on his head, in between his eyes.  I can only imagine what careful planning that took.  So having failed dismally with my bird of prey defence, I'm at a loss as to what to do with those recalcitrant Starlings with precision aim.  I wonder if the hardware store sells something, perhaps a little more concerning, like a Pterodactyl.  Don't suppose I could get a stuffed one anywhere?