My role as the guy who feeds half the bird population of north east Victoria is over for the year. After our second harvest there's not much left on the trees. The galahs, corellas and parrots, the bower bird clans and the currawongs can all find somewhere else to eat now, and leave our paddocks to the two massive clans of magpies that own them.

With other trees, the damage that bird flocks cause is quite obvious. We don’t get any almonds, even though this year the trees were heavily set. The parrots and their kind work through the trees and clean us out. The ground is littered with shells and half eaten almond.

With the olives, there's less carnage. There's the occasional olive with a peck mark still hanging on the tree, but mostly there's not much evidence that we've been robbed. I think we have so much on the trees it's hard to notice anything missing. (It's different now…after months of watching heavy-hanging branches, the trees are now strangely empty.)

Local nut tree farmers go mad trying to protect their crop. Near us is a walnut farm, and for six months a year an air cannon kabooms at regular intervals. Occasionally I hear gunshots. We have a few walnut trees, and theoretically should be getting something from them. But walnuts need spraying at regular intervals or after rain, and we don’t do that, so the nuts that evade the birds usually end up with a black rot and we get nothing.

In the next valley there are a lot of commercial orchards, and they all use air cannons. There are olive groves there, and I have worked there, either pruning or hand-harvesting. It's a war-zone! All day, from all directions, at unsynched random intervals there is a constant barrage of air cannons. I can't see how its effective. Surely the birds get used to it and just ignore it?

At certain times a year we get visited by hundreds of sulphur-crested cockatoos. They are noisy buggers and descend en masse telegraphing their arrival. Our kelpie knows the noise and he's off with a bang through the dog door, and rushes around the house orchard barking at the hundreds of cockies. By day three the novelty has worn off and he has to be coaxed to do his job. At the other end, the cockies are less worried about it, and lazily circle until he goes back inside. After a week they ignore each other, and they industriously strip our pecan nut and almond trees.

But olives? No, they don't touch them. I have heard they do elsewhere, and chew the trees and snip off branches, but we don't seem to suffer the same attention.

Co-incidentally, beautiful, huge, yellow crested black cockatoos escape the cold in the mountains and come down to visit us at this time of year. But they aren't interested in the olives, they are working the huge gums along the river, cleaning out the seed pods.

So, we are finished. We did three days of mechanical picking. The first two days, in May, we collected some 29 fields bins representing 11 tons of olives. On the third day, in June, we picked the last trees we didn't get to earlier, then cherry-picked the trees with a remnant crop. In the first pick some trees unloaded more than 40 kilos of olives. By the second pick a generous tree gave us 10 kilos.

In our grove the heavy tree is occasionally a random tree here and there, but its mostly wedges of productive trees in a group…this triangle, that row, that end of the bottom paddock and so on.

The second pick produced 2 tons of olives. We knocked at three o'clock…there was nothing worth picking left.

On paper you'd have to say the second pick wasn't very productive, but the oil is good, lusher than the first pick.

From here there's still plenty to do. The oil has to settle and be racked off, leaving the sediment behind so it doesn't contaminate the oil.

And, like last year, we will enter our oil in various competitions. I think we have one good oil and one excellent oil, but lab tests and a panel of judges will tell me more objectively how we fared.

I find the harvest process quite stressful. Apart from the stress of watching the weather…frost predicted, hailstorms maybe, endless rain for three weeks….There's a lot of separate contractors to co-ordinate, This year we had a Covid-inspired rescheduling to manage, then a machinery breakdown re-scheduling. Miraculously it all came together.

On the Friday I came home with a trailer-load of 200 litre oil drums, Tony the forklift operator was waiting for me. In the apparently endless rain he delicately unloaded the barrels and shoe-horned them into our shed.

"What happens now", he asked me.

"After you go, I'm following you out and I'm closing the front gate. I don't want to see or speak to anyone for a few days!"

I got up later than normal the next day, and spent some time on my poor neglected vegetable garden.

After tasting all the new oil samples, of course!