BALI HAI AND FULL MOON SUNDAY 22ND AUGUST 2021 BUT NO RUN

BALI HAI AND FULL MOON SUNDAY 22ND AUGUST 2021 BUT NO RUN

Anything exciting happen to you this past week in lockdown? Tell me about it. Tuesday was Independence Day but no bands of boys and girls marching on the highway impeding traffic flow: usual bags of bunting though – bendera merah putih. One heard of manifestations in Renon protesting prolonged lockdown, but nothing compared to street battles in Sydney or Melbourne. Too many volatile immigrants from southern and eastern Europe.

Two days excursion to the seaside, which always an adventure, though I never actually swam, just lazed playing scrabble with always excellent Sauvignon Blanc to hand plus the odd snorterino. Lovely weather, lovely people, lovely fun. Thankyou dear Sita. An opportunity also for me, being usually incommunicado, to find out what’s going on in the world outside Bali. Bloody Tahiban how can you trust these people? And poor sods in Haiti hammered again. Even hurricane heading for NYC. Enough news thank you.

Got home after dark to find whole bundle of birding journals on my desk, some going back to 2019. Unbelievable: where had they been? Now mid-afternoon and birds reasserting themselves – one sound I have so far failed to mention – the extraordinary atonal pitch of miniature bamboo flutes attached to flocks of high-flying pigeons. You can barely see them, but you can certainly hear them. Butterflies galore: I had a huge Hypolimnas bolina in the garden, but a subspecies or race I know only from Malaya. In the book – not my book! – it is described as H.b. incommoda, similar to anomala (my book p 69) but very much larger. Then I had again the two dancing Fauns this morning: the brutally pestered female lies on her side wings closed: I never saw any fly do that before. A huge crop of rambutan ripening: White mango in lavender flower.