The Wing-Friends and Other Books

In Blogger's slideshows images are greatly reduced, so lose much of their impact. And captions added to them in Picasa Albums vanish, so the images shown above are: the Milky Way, the Orion Nebula, Earth, Earth with New Zealand circled, New Zealand, Auckland & the Hauraki Gulf, Waiheke Island, some native NZ forest, a Fantail and chicks, various doves, etc.

(If you want to see the first ten images in their original size, they are in a posting made on the 24th of November 2011.)

My book The Wing-Friends is an imaginative tale of a small brave boy, a magical adventure, a magnificent Pegasus and the wonderful Kingdom of the Pegasi. It has been given very good reviews, and virtually every reader on Goodreads has so far awarded it five stars. It is available here. Some of my other writings are available as e-books, such as The Lower Deck, which is an over-the-top take on Waiheke happenings--sort of.

Friday 16 March 2012

TWENTY-THREE THEN TWENTY-ONE

Up till  the 10th of March the greatest number of doves I had seen on the ground at the same time was twenty-three, although the usual maximum to fly down from the trees in the morning to feed on the ground and from my hands was twenty-two.

That was haw many there were on the morning of the 9th, but two were noticeably off-colour. They were hunched down, not eating with the rest and looked very sleepy. The other twenty were their normal vigorous selves. At night I saw that two were hunched together well under the office part of the building, and in the morning to my dismay one was dead. The other one, a fairly recent chick, died a few hours later despite my attempts to revive it. I assume the first one was its mother. Perhaps she ate something she should not have, such as a poisonous karaka berry, and passed it on to her chick in her 'milk'. I buried them in the forest at the foot of large boulder--Dove Rock as I call it.


So now, somewhere round here, there are twenty-one doves but since that day no more than twenty have arrived on the ground at once.