One hot summer.

We are in the middle of our summer.  Being subtropical & on the coastal fringe we expect it to be hot & muggy.  We expect our afternoons to be electric with approaching storms & sudden torrential downpours, for lush steamy days of languid heat & the heavy, drowsy  somnolence that drugs the senses & dulls the mind. We get a *wet* season.  Not quite the equatorial months of water falling from the sky but rain, yet each day I find myself filling our birdbaths multiple times & the number & variety of the birds I see is increasing.

I have had birdbaths longer than I have had a garden. Water brings the birds & over the years you learn who to expect perched on the rim & when they are likely to arrive. Our regulars are the little dusky & olive backed honeyeaters.  They are always around, winter & summer, & they arrive first thing in the morning & late in the afternoon.  They are noisy & aggressive.  They know about the cats & they post a watchman who shrieks & screams if a cat so much as twitches a whisker.

We have noisy friar birds, butcher birds, & blue~faced honeyeaters who sometimes come & loll, until all the water is gone & the little birds scream in protest but there are birds we never see at the birdbath: robins; flycatchers, finches. These are hawkers, shy insectivores who prefer the top of the canopy or the hidden places of the bush.  They stay away from humans yet this year I have seen them all at the birdbath. They arrive in the heat of the day, have a quick dip & dab & flit away.

We are in drought. Even the little double barred finches have come for the water. Everything in our garden is stressed, even our big well established eucalyptus. Along the foreshore we are seeing wallabies & paddy melons travelling between water sources & we find the birdbaths tippled by the roos trying to reach the water. The curlews have floundered in & out of the waterlily pond; the bandicoots were not so lucky.  They got in but not out again.

In the midst of peaking heat waves & exorbitant, record breaking temperatures we are waiting... there hasn't been a spate of big cyclones in some time. The signs are all there.