Milestones and Birthday

Today our blog reached quite an amazing milestone - it has been viewed over 10,000 times, not bad!
My major task for the day was to baton down the hatches and get the house ready for Hamish's birthday sleepover, but isn't it amazing how like attracts like as our guest is as quiet as Hamish, and has as gentle a personality as Hamish so our evening with three boys all aged eight or under has been amazingly quiet but I get ahead of myself.
In between domestic duties I went for a walk around my local patch Cattana Wetlands, and I only had to dodge a couple of heavy showers. These gave some good photo opportunities as the clouds drifted over the hills behind

As the weather improved the forest / woodland edges were absolutely heaving with birds all desperately trying to feed after a very wet week when it must have been a real struggle for them.
The most common species was probably Leaden Flycatcher, but despite there being at times up to five individuals in the same tree they were remarkably difficult to photograph ( so here is one from last week)

Other goodies included
Black-faced Monarch

Little Bronze-Cuckoo

 Yellow Honeyeater

Black-necked Stork or Jabiru are always spectacular to see, today this female (has a yellow eye) came in to land on the car park before she realised it was not an area of water

It was not just birds that were showy today either this White-Banded Plane was very approachable

With the house cleaned and sorted I picked up the children before going in and picking up Tish from work plus some decorations for Hamish's cake

decorated with a range of "Trashies"The cake was a great success

Oh yes forgot to mention that the morning had started off with the children, Alan, Jen and myself watching the Annular Solar Eclipe!