spring

Officially spring is here, which reminded me the flymo broke the last time I mowed the lawns at the start of winter so there's another job on the list. Not a hard one to fix but has to be done soon - the lawns started growing again last week and have doubled in height...

We've got three Kowhai trees on our property and they all started to flower (the photo is a Kowhai flower) about two weeks ago. Yesterday there was at one point three Tui and one Bellbird in our largest tree.

The Bellbirds have a wonderful song and the Tui's are playful mimics. We had a regular Tui visitor when we lived in Wellington that would mimic the sound of our phone ringing perfectly and there are stories of Department of Conservation staff trying to gauge numbers of rare birds in remote areas by playing their song and recording the number of responses. Apparently they were astounded by how many more of the rare birds there were than they had expected until they realised the Tui were repeating the played birdcalls.