A Day of Excitement

It started out as a normal day.
Weather was very windy as predicted. This plus the extreme dry caused by the drought meant a bad fire day.
No one would be so stupid as to start a so called controlled burn would they?
Yes, the farmer a few blocks behind us did.
He was the one who caused the big bush fire we had in 2009.
We could see smoke rising over us but someone had already reported it.
This is never a good thing to see in our area.
The local rural fire brigade was soon on the job and had a couple of trucks up there to put the runaway fire out.
I talked to the fire chief on his way out. What he said about our neighbour is unprintable.
He is apparently an annual problem for them and being the descendant of one of the pioneer families in the area doesn’t think the law applies to him.
So settling down to an early bottle of wine to steady the nerves, I got a call from my adjoining neighbour.

Our cows were acting funny, had something surrounded, were very agitated and making lots of noise.
I went to investigate.
When they saw me, they came charging up and then turned and ran back to the original spot as much as to say “here, here!
There I found a very young, tiny and frightened baby kangaroo (a joey) trying to hide in the grass. It had obviously been abandoned by its mother.
So I wrapped it up in my jacket and brought it up to the house.
She (as it turned out to be) was a quivering wreck but after a hour’s nursing she quietened down.
Once a father, always a father!
The co driver called the native animal rescue service, WIRES, and they came a few hours later to pick her up.
The kangaroos are suffering from a lack of feed caused by the drought and have ‘invaded’ the more populated areas.
What happened to the mother we will never know but ‘our girl’ is now in safe hands.
She will be reared by the carer to a stage when she can be released back into the wild.