Dry Season weather

One sure way to tell whether it is really the dry season in Darwin is to pay close attention to what is in the air. During the wet season, most of the air is actually water. At the beginning of the dry season, it is mostly dragonflies. Shortly after that, the air is mostly smoke. Today, the air is mostly smoke. Actually, it has been pretty interesting today. There is a big fire burning to the south, which is filling the air with smoke and ash. I biked home from the university just after dark, and it was a clear enough night that I could see the cloud of smoke trailing off to the north. The really impressive thing was the red glow coming from the front of the fire. Looked like a nice sunset, except that it was in the south. Amazing. On the ride home, I was bombarded by ash and burned leaves which have been steadily falling all evening. Of course, since it was a nice sunny day with dry air (good for fires I guess) I decided to do a load of laundry. It will be interesting to see if it ends up smelling like a camping trip when it's dry.

Otherwise, it was a pretty normal day. I went to the field site in Humpty Doo to see how things are progressing there. It's been a bit of a strange transition season because of all of the late rain (and cyclone) we got this year. So, it's still pretty wet out there, as my boots can attest. There are still a few frogs calling, but they're not very serious about it. While wandering around, I tried to catch some lizards for Seb. Lots of those around, but they insisted on running up very tall trees - several meters above the reach of my noose. I tried climbing one paperbark tree, but the lizard was much better at climbing than I was. I only made it 5m off the ground, and it was about twice that height, perched nicely on top of the very tallest leaves. Oh well. I tried.