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Snow Kidding!

It’s easy to tell I’m Wellington-raised, since it rates a mention on my blog - it’s snowing! I didn’t know it snowed in Christchurch. So pretty :) Today it was 1 with a windchill of minus 6.

I took these photos which I will post later – the snow got to 6cm deep on top of the car, which I found most impressive! I went over to Deb’s and took the dogs for a good hard run in the snow, which they really enjoyed. We spent about 45 minutes off the lead in the park, and when I got them home I bathed them. Gave me the fright of my life! I picked up Millie and there were these grey-brown lumps hanging from her belly skin. At first glance they looked like some sort of tumour (I’ve seen too much “Emergency Vets” on Animal Planet) and I was just at the “How the hell do I break that to Deb?!” stage when I thought “… unless it’s ice.” Which of course it was.

Arrgh! Deb is sick and will be infectious for 5 days, so Leon had to go to stay at Mel’s – and therefore I won’t be able to get online for a week, because he is resting through the day. Personally I didn’t think that letting myself in with a key around mid-morning, hooking in a phone cable, typing and maybe a little washing of dishes and folding of clothes would be so very noisy, especially since he has his 9-week-old puppy constantly in the bedroom with him, and she’s not exactly quiet… but hey, what do I know about it. :( boo sucks. Grrr! I just want to be able to get online for an few hours a day (consistently!) without paying through the nose for it!

I read “The Life of Birds” by David Attenborough, which was really good, as his stuff almost invariably is. Things I learnt:

• The only bird in the world with a beak longer than its body is the sword-billed hummingbird.


• All birds have egg teeth, but one hatches without it. The megapode forms an egg-tooth about three weeks before hatching, but the tooth is reabsorbed before emergence. The chick uses its powerful legs to kick its way free, and then spends the next several days kicking its way out from under the pile of vegetation and sand that produced the heat to incubate the eggs. The eggs are all produced with very generous yolks and the chick hatches with most of the sustenance still available. It uses this energy to sustain it through the cycles of digging and rest needed to dig to the surface. It takes long enough to do this that the chick can produce flight feathers in-between hatching and freedom and so emerges from the ground fully fledged and able to fly.


• The king penguin chick fasts for months in the middle of its growth cycle. Once the chick hatches, the parents feed it desperately for a few months, but when winter sets in the parents are forced to leave to find food to avoid starvation. The chicks have not yet moulted to adult feathers and so cannot enter the water to find food. So the chicks huddle together through the long winter months and starve – many die, in fact, from starvation and cold. But in the spring their parents return and resume feeding their chicks until they finally moult and can return to the feeding grounds for their first winter. So king penguin only produce young every two years.

I learnt lots of other things too, now I think about it. It’s a really interesting book. But I should let you guys read it rather than summarising half-remembered bits.

See you in a week... unless I get desperate and go to a cyber-cafe, which is fairly likely to happen.

Posted by phreq at August 17, 2004 10:47 AM | TrackBack