Re: OT: Weather in the east !

F.James Cripwell wrote:
Trish Brown (pmcbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) writes:
Cheryl Isaak wrote:
On 3/4/08 5:50 PM, in article jdkrs3hfcbg38115cjtk5ocr9ug1upddtp@xxxxxxx,
"lucretia borgia" <lucretiaborgia@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

What are you people sending us now !!! The forecast is sending dire
warnings that the snow is only going to last a few hours then we are
to have several hours of freezing rain - IOW - downed power lines and
outages.

This should not be happening - I demand global warming !
So do I

Cheryl
The winter weary

Noooooooooooo! We've just had a most glorious succession of lovely cool days. We don't want the heat: you can have it! Bring on winter!

--
Trish {|:-} Newcastle, NSW, Australia

You are lucky, Trish. They have cancelled global warming. Furthermore, you
have been getting some much needed rain in Australia, which is
connected to the idea that global temperatures are cooling. I understand
there is significant water flowing in the Murray/Darling basin.

Oh yes! And there's significant water in our local dams (Glenbawn, Grahamstown and Chichester) at last! Y'know, it makes such a wonderful difference to see green grass and fat cattle instead of yellowed, dying grass and skeletons! There are still plenty of places inland which haven't yet received adequate rain, but at least there's been *some*thing.

The Darling River has been in major serious trouble for a long while. The wholesale removal of trees has caused the water table to be seriously stuffed up. That is, the water table has risen owing to the negative impact of missing trees (whose roots keep the water level *down* close to the bedrock or aquifers where it belongs). Considering much of inland Australia gets its water from the Great Artesian Basin (a massive aquifer or water-holding bedrock), this is a serious phenomenon!

Along with the rising water table, you get dissolved salts being deposited above ground and crystallising there. This, of course, means salty soil in which hardly anything will grow! The effect on the Darling River (our largest) has been inestimable. Great swathes of its length have been succumbing to eutrophication (loss of oxygen owing to slowed flow and increase in dissolved salts and other pollutants). Blue-green algae are proliferating where they have never been recorded before and stock-loss has been severe as a result.

A large effect has been seen on the move of inland animal and bird species toward the coasts. Thus, I'm seeing enormous flocks of parrots that would never have come this far east before. The flock of two hundred or so Sulphur Crested Cockatoos that used to deafen us a few years ago has just about doubled in size. There's another flock of Corellas hanging around too: it has around five or six hundred members and a fair proportion of those are Long-Billed Corellas which *used* to be a strictly inland species and one on the endangered list. Hah! Not any more! I stopped counting at a hundred last time the big flock visited our place. They're getting pretty cocky (no pun intended) too and have an unfortunate habit of munching on people's TV cables and other electrical lines. Zapp goes the Cocky!

There've been interesting smaller parrots about as well: Musk Lorikeets and Little Lorikeets and Fig Parrots and Turquoise Parrots. Oh, and a growing flock of White-tailed *Black* Cockatoos (normally only seen in more remote mountainous or wet-sclerophyll areas) has been swanning about our suburb. That really has been an eye-opener!

We've seen more and more snakes and lizards around locally this past twelve months than ever before. They were coming up from the local swamplands in search of food and, presumably, a bit of water as well. This explained the existence of a new family of kookaburras in our street: they like nothing more than a juicy snake for brekkie. I saw one youngster fly up onto a power pole, perch there for a second and then fly off with a small (15") snake in its bill! Now, what the snake was doing on the power pole utterly escapes me, but I guess this snake will not be leaving any pole-climbing offspring to add to the gene pool...

Anyway, sixteen bl**dy kookas waking you up at the crack o' dawn is no joke! Just one or two kookaburras is enough to wake the dead, but Mum and Dad and the sisters and the cousins and the aunts is beyond belief!!!

It'll be interesting to see what happens now there's a bit more water about. Will all the inland creatures go back home or will they stay on around the coasts where they've found easy pickings?

--
Trish {|:-} Newcastle, NSW, Australia
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