Waiting for the wet season and progress at work

When preparing to come to Lae last year I kept an eye on the weather app and it looked like there is no well-defined wet/dry seasonality here. It turns out that that is true of Lae on the coast but the further inland you go the more defined the seasons are. We are at 11 Mile on the Highlands Highway - 13 km as the Torresian Crow flies from the coast. We have definitely been in a dry phase since December but it should be reverting about now. Jenny is sad as the swimming pool here has been closed for a couple of weeks because the water supply to keep it fresh is too low. Every night lately we get thunderstorms building up and usually some rain but not enough yet. It will be interesting to see what happens to bird and insect life once the wet comes properly.

Monthly average rainfall (mm) at Lae. We have had very little rainfall at 11 Mile since December.

An exciting week at work as we received the first submissions to the PNG Journal of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries since it went dormant in 2014. We are now giving each other editor and referee roles so we can proceed the papers to publication. We even have the Director General refereeing papers. 

I learned how to copyedit a submitted paper into a nicely formatted PDF and will run some training this week so our media team can handle this in the future. All our science staff have been advised that the journal is now open for business so we anticipate more submissions this week.

This is the design I came up with for page 1 of our Journal papers
(coincidentally similar to that used for the Crop and Pasture Science journal).

Jenny took this lovely photo of a Skink outside our offices recently. I put it on iNaturalist and it has been identified as Semon's Green Tree Skink. 'Green' not because of its colouring but because it has green blood - possibly an anti-malarial strategy. 'Semon' because it is named after the German zoologist - Richard Wolfgang Semon (1859-1918) - who travelled extensively in Australian and the Indonesian Archipelago.

Semon's Green Tree Skink (Prasinohaema semoni) in the NARI HQ garden.
(Photo by Jenny Clark)

We have Easter coming up and will have a short holiday in Port Moresby. We will have a day in Varirata National Park and a couple of nights on Loloata Island. Looking forward to it very much!

A quiet couple of weeks for birds. I've seen one Sacred Kingfisher - an early return from Australia perhaps? Yesterday a White-bellied Cuckooshrike was calling near the house and this morning three Grey Crows flew over the village heading south.

The chap who used to own HBS (including our village) had a house here with lots of caged birds (Birds of Paradise, Lorikeets, Eclectus Parrots etc.). Very distracting when you are listening for new birds. I was told the birds would be going to the aviaries at the University of Technology in Lae but the people in the next house down the hill from us have acquired 3 female and 1 male Eclectus Parrots in a small cage. Very sad and also very noisy and distracting to the village birder.