Smoke, continued ...

I've already written about the problems of smoke from bushfires being blown in from New South Wales.

The problem has not gone away - we're still getting smoke blown in, and of course it's worrying, very worrying.

I've written elsewhere about fire planning for the historic site I volunteer at, and unlike all the other times when I went through disaster planning when I was working, this one seems horribly real, and reveals gaps in our planning - fundamental things like which vehicles will we have available and what can we fit in them, especially given that the evacuation might not be as orderly as the paper plan suggests.

But despite everything we're still here. Wheezing a little - you can even hear the cat wheeze when he purrs - but surviving.

Yesterday, we'd arranged to go out to dinner at our favourite restaurant in town for a private pre Christmas treat. And before we went out I did something I've never felt the need to do before - I downloaded the emergency services app to my phone - just because.

While we were at dinner, a fire service truck came up the street, for a moment we almost panicked at the sight of it - we didn't realise, but the fire service volunteers were having a kids's party and fund raiser  at the pub next door, and of course Santa came by fire truck.

What was remarkable was the number of people, myself included, in the restaurant who got up and went out to put a ten or twenty dollar bill in the collection tin.

People are worried ...

Smoke

Where we live we are mercifully unaffected by bushfires - we've had a reasonable amount of rain, and while things are definitely drying out the fire risk is no worse than usual.

I take comfort from the fact that despite some near misses, the town has not been directly affected by fire since European settlement, which is near enough 170 years.

However, what we are getting is smoke.

Smoke blown down from the fires around Sydney. Most of the time we've had winds from the south, and the air's been reasonably clear, but today the wind's swung round to the north and we're already getting smoke. Not as bad as on the horror day three or four weeks ago, when you could see a blue haze in the street outside, but bad enough with the smoke haze obscuring the hills around.

So, what to do?

Well, earlier this year, in August, we decided to flee the cold for a couple of weeks and drive up to Maleny in Queensland where we rented a cottage for a week.

Driving up was a cold experience, freezing temperatures, snow flurries between Tamworth and Armidale, but Maleny was pleasantly warm.

On the way back we had a couple of days being cultural in Brisbane, and the drove down the coast with the aim of a couple of days in Port Macquarie.

When we got there, Port Macquarie was still shrouded in smoke from the Lindfield Road peat fire, and while an onshore winds meant that it didn't affect us much, when the wind dropped you could smell the smoke, and if you blew your nose you got a kleenex full of black snot like you sometimes get in London (or Bangkok, or indeed the dreaded Singapore Haze).

An experience I'd describe as more tacky than dangerous, but it did start to make me think about what we would do if we were badly affected by smoke, given that J is asthmatic, and despite being very fit earlier in my life I seem to be more affected by smoke and dust as I get older.

Now the problem is not so bad that we need an air purifier but we certainly need to be better informed. We could of course buy our own air quality monitor - they're something between eighty and a hundred dollars on ebay, but the individual state environmental monitoring agencies have monitoring stations in Albury (NSW) and Wangaratta (Victoria) both about 40km away and lower down than we are, but probably good enough as an indicator of a developing problem:

There's a number of apps out there that can access the environmental monitoring data, so, for the moment I settled on downloading an app that lets us check the air quality when we're out and about. I chose Airmatters as I liked the way the data was presented.

The other thing I did was buy a pair of good quality Chinese made filter masks, similar to those that you  see people wearing on bad air days in Singapore.

I chose to buy these softer, flexible masks as I thought they'd be more comfortable to wear. We already have a pair of industrial masks with replaceable pm25 filters from when we were doing a lot of sanding and plastering during home renovations and I can tell you that, while effective, they're extremely uncomfortable to wear long term, especially on a hot sticky summer's day. That and they make you look like Darth Vader.

I also have a pack of disposable pm25 masks that I picked up somewhere, but there's a problem - they're made for builders.

I can get them to fit reasonably well on my face, but J, who has a small face, can't get a decent seal, and remember, unless they fit properly you might as well not bother.

As you'd expect, there's a lot of people out there trying to make a buck out of the current air quality problems in Sydney and Canberra and asking silly prices, but I managed to get a pair of reasonable ones with replaceable filters for about 10 bucks from ebay, and at that price they're cheap enough to leave in the bushfire/storm panic box until they're needed.

Hopefully we'll never need them, but at least we've got them if we do ...

Moth crypticity

A zillion years ago, when I was a real scientist, I became interested in crypticity - like why are some potential prey camouflaged, while others are not.

There's also a question here about fruit colouration and the evolution of colour vision in forgaging primates.

As I said, all that is a long time ago, but I've retained a fascination with insect camouflage, and this morning there was a nice example on the outside wall of our house:

note how the moth is nicely coloured to match the pattern of lichen growing on a tree branch ...

A great sooty owl ?

Last night, about two in the morning, we were woken up by a strange noise.

J accused me of snoring in a strange manner, but then it came again, a long descending noise, louder this time.

Noticeably, the possums who live in the hundred and fifty year old elm trees that line our street had all shut up and had stopped playing soccer on our roof.

It sounded once more, and then after a long pause,  we could hear the possums starting to creep about.

The cat, of course, had been woken up and wanted to go out, however if there was a predator about, one capable of scaring possums, it would probably be capable of doing some damage to an elderly and rather visible white cat, so we kept him in, much to his annoyance.

At first we thought it might be a powerful owl, which has been recorded in this area, and certainly there's enough prey in the forest and scrub on the old gold workings to sustain them - that and being happy to live in urban areas - one has even been sighted living in the middle of Canberra.

But the call didn't sound right - not hooty enough. A bit more searching on bird call websites and we came up with another possible candidate - the greater sooty owl.

Now, the greater sooty owl is not normally known in this area, tending to live in the temperate rainforests on the wetter east side of the Great Dividing range, rather than here in Beechworth on the western slopes where it's bit drier, and the native forest is drier and scrubbier with fewer old growth trees.

They're not known to wander far from their established territories. But of course, this year the forests in East Gippsland have been unusually dry, with bushfires closing the great Alpine road.

So possibly, just possibly, a sooty owl or two has crossed the divide in attempting to escape the fires and is trying to establish itself around Beechworth.

Certainly New South Wales Environment reports them as being present in the Alpine National Park, end Environment Victoria has published a paper that suggests they're not unknown in this area.

We'll see if we hear them again ...