I WAS sitting in the Hide the other day and it was raining. It was raining the way it should rain, a good steady, ground-soaking drizzle – not the sort of rain that washes the back garden into the car port or is just enough to mess up the newly-washed car.
I sat there for some time, just watching it rain, and I pondered what a very satisfying thing is rain. One can almost hear the plants slurping it up, and if it happens to rain at night then you can definitely hear the frogs rejoice. We are fortunate to live very close to the Black Lake and there is much froggy rejoicing, believe me.
I know a little about rain. I spent many of my growing-up years in Devonshire in England, on the edge of Dartmoor, where it always rained. We have enjoyed the soft misty rain in America’s Appalachians and Scotch mist, of course, and we have also experienced the monsoon in India and Pakistan, which is like someone emptying a tub of lukewarm water on your head. But more recently I was enjoying the gentle rain on the Hide.
It’s not always a satisfying thing, though, is it? When we watch the clouds gathering and smell the rain coming, we know we’re about to lose our television signal. The electricity often seems to fail during a good rain and just the other day I couldn’t make an international telephone call because I was told the ‘connectivity’ had failed because of the weather – it happened to be raining. Anyway, this is all very appropriate with World Water Day being on Saturday and World Meteorological Day on Sunday – perhaps it will drizzle all weekend.
Changing the subject slightly, I was lying awake at about two o’clock the other morning when I heard a foghorn. This was odd as it was a beautifully clear night (Scorpio and the Southern Cross were in full and bright display), but there in the far distance was a foghorn. I lay and listened for a while and then another distant thought came to mind – the Foghorn Bird. Out there somewhere in the night was a buff-spotted flufftail, pretending to be a foghorn. Listen out for it, it’s quite unusual, described as an uncommon resident and very secretive, but it does sound like a foghorn!
And to end with another bird – we were sitting in the Hide the other day and were treated to a spectacular fly past by a long-crested eagle. It swooped and soared right in front of us and then stooped into the valley between us and the sea. It did not re-emerge, so we must assume it caught whatever it was after and ate it right there and then. This is wonderful, because just the other day we had a juvenile long-crested eagle give us a similar fly past – so unless it grew up in just a few days, that would be two in a week. Cheers!
PS: Just for the record, we had 85 glorious millimetres on that rainy day, half our supposed average for the month – yay!
