Its not just over there, we usually have a continuous flow of birds across the garden from bush to bush, stopping off at the bird bath and feeders. At the moment, almost zero. Julie just saw a single redstart fly past, and that was unusual enough to make a comment about.
Plants look very sorry for themselves, we are collecting water from showers, sinks etc to try and keep them going. We have about 4000 litres of rainwater collection spread about under gutters, what rain ? Down to squeezing the water butts now to get the drips out.
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The field is normally grass, at the moment it is like walking on weetabix. Except for this green patch which is thriving and will need strimming shortly. 'Fosse septique' is common over here, and after treatment, the clean (!) water goes to a soakaway, a bed of sand just under the ground. Guess where ours is.
The trees in the distance are over a natural underground water course. Trees nearer to our place are shedding leaves like it is autumn.
Andrew.
It is much the same here on the west coast of Canada too. The grass is like golden straw, exactly matching your "Weetabix" description. Watering the borders pretty much just stirs up the dust. Deep watering of the "grass" twice weekly is allowed, but futile at this point. I cannot call it "lawn", because so many species of plant seeds have made their way into it that keeping it mowed short its the only way to may it appear decent. Even some of the more drought resistant weeds are fading away!
With the avian flu having shut down feeding birds here for the past several months in the hope that the chicken farms can survive, there are very few birds around. It just seems to be a bad year for all of the bird species that we commonly encounter here. Feeding the birds has been prohibited, but even the ground feeding birds are fewer in number.
Our neighbour fancies himself as a bit of a bird watcher and mentioned seeing an Oriole in his back garden last week, that is not native to the area. That does seem to be the situation, with some unusual species visiting on occasion in recent years.
About four years ago, I was working at our main campus near Vancouver and encountered a bird that stayed there for about three weeks wandering around on the ground. It had long legs and neck and never took to the air, just ran around on the ground. After getting close enough one morning to snap a photo and doing the research, it was clearly a Roadrunner which is native to southern USA, Mexico and Central America. Roadrunners are a member of the Cuckoo family and the only place I'd even seen one before was in the "Bugs Bunny" cartoons.
We normally have hundreds of American Goldfinches, House Finches, and Woodpeckers zooming around, vying for seed at the feeders. The Hummingbirds seem to have taken a vacation, despite us having plenty of flowers. I haven't seen any Robin in weeks out for their early morning worm fest.
Even the pesky Starlings in their throngs haven't visited lately. There even seems to be fewer crows dropping walnuts on the roof and road too. We do have Chickadees in fair numbers though.
All too soon, the weather will change and hopefully the Juncos will return.
In all, it is a very unusual growing season. Apart from our many perennials, flowering plant germination from seed and growth was much slower, whether started in the greenhouse or scattered. Last year a friend whose family grows strawberry and blueberry crops gave me about 10 strawberry plants.
They did pretty well overall. This year, I had one lowly strawberry during the expected time frame. I noticed a couple of days ago that one plant has about 10 berries on it almost ripe.
I have long English cucumber plants and field cucumber plants out in above ground stock tanks and until last week in the greenhouse where they do exceptionally well. The plants in the greenhouse formed flowers and some small fruits, but nothing more. The outside plants were yielding a couple of cucumbers daily, but suddenly slowed down this week.
Tomato plants are going slowly, but all are Romas, since the other varieties never took off. Garlic and chives grow regardless and for the first time ever, I have managed to grow spring onions, which always germinated but failed in the past.
So, it does seem to be an unusual year!