I don't have COVID, or rather, I am not testing positive for COVID. It could be flu, could be the new boy in town, RSV. Its just a cold, I think. But a shocker.

Its not life threatening, But it has dragged on for weeks. It came back from Melbourne with Sylvia initially, and she was quite sick for a week. I thought it had bypassed me, then eventually, just as she was getting better, I crashed. A week later she was sick again, making me think it was a different cold. And now I am sick again. Its been 4 weeks now with one or both of us not well. At the moment its both of us.

The two of us have been moping around, coughing and scraping our noses raw. I go to bed thinking, "I hope I feel better tomorrow", have a bad night's sleep and eventually get up feeling crap. I go out in the morning to feed the cows and try and prevent the dogs from going stir crazy, and then we both flop in the loungeroom. It is an effort to haul in firewood, and we using a lot more with us sitting inside all day.

There's jobs starting to pile up, and I am behind on the big tasks like pruning and firewood. A few weeks back I felled a huge wattle that had died and was overhanging the grassy flat by the river. It was dropping big, dead branches and dangerous. Its down now, and mostly cut into logs, but most years that area is underwater for a couple of weeks in Spring with the snow-melt floods. Any cut firewood will disappear downriver for someone else to find. Its only August, so obviously there's time, but every time I go past its a toothache niggling at me. (And, there's another two very large wattles that collapsed all by themselves. A lot of timber to cut up and stack.)

There's trees to plant. Its finally rained and the ground is wet and as diggable as its going to be. If I leave it too long the saplings I have will outgrow their tubes, and they won't be established before it all dries out again.

This one is a new problem.....this year for the last few weeks we have had around 150 yellow-tailed black cockatoos onsite. We see them every year, regularly. They are a local weather tool....when bad weather is coming they come down from the mountains and fly along the Ovens River. When the weather is going to improve they fly back up the mountains again. Each way they screech and cackle, and it takes an hour or two for them to pass. They are huge birds, almost as big as a chicken, and glorious to see and hear. And quite confident. They rarely fly off if we happen to be nearby. But this year there are so many! And they are stopping longer, and feeding here.

The feeding process involves breaking into timber with their hard beaks looking for grubs.
(This website has some >>great photos of these birds, including one shredding a live gum tree just like they are doing here.)

The old dead wattles are perfect, in that the wood is soft and the dead ones are full of boring insects. But they've done all that, so now they are tackling the big, live gums. But the big gum branches are heavy, and any structural weakness caused by cockatoos hacking away at them leads to the branches breaking off. The poor old gums have survived bushfires, floods, frost and snow, and now they are being debranched by hungry cockatoos. The very big broken branches are dropping around the gum trees, which are mostly in my hay paddock. I will need to get them off the ground before the grass grows through them, otherwise they'll be there as a hidden booby trap for the hay-cutters. Its a chainsaw and trailer job, at least three full trailer loads of bulky, twisted branches.

Doesn't look much in the pic, but these are big branches!

Chewed branch showing beak marks

This is a big branch, 12cm in diameter. You can see the track of the wood-boring grub, The cockies have worked away at the branch exposing the grub's bore-channel, eventually chewing enough off for the branch to give way

The rain we have only just recently had has greened things up a little, but there's not much feed in it for my sheep. They mooch around, and if they see me come charging over to be first in the queue if I am putting out food. Unfortunately I am only doing that a couple of times a week. The supermarket green waste slows down over winter, so there is less in the wheelie bins for the sheep.

The cows have been getting hay for 8 weeks now, but this week I started doubling the ration. They are starting to lose condition on just the grass. I can see it works because my neighbour's cows are bony and looking underfed. His paddocks are the same as mine, but they don't get as much supplementary feed. Most winters I supplement my cows' diet with olive prunings, which they love, but I haven't kept up with demand because I've not been well. So I am behind on the pruning, and my cows are going hungry. Not a win-win.

Soon, not yet, I will need to reduce the numbers of sheep. We are carrying too many, and they wouldn't be as short of food if we had less. But that means rounding them up, getting all the tags in order, tidying up toenails and feet and then sorting them out to do the paperwork.

And I need to be fit to do that work.