Plovers, Solar, etc.

All 4 of the plover babies hatched out and seemed to be doing well. They are almost two weeks old now but we only see three chicks. We saw all four for a couple of days only, but after the neighbour mowed his orchard up close to the fence next door we only ever saw the three. Another possibility would be the hawk that comes around, we saw him one day around that time. We haven’t been able to get any more photos of them together, they move quickly now and are never together. We normally just eyeball them a couple of times a day just for proof of life purposes. I mowed that section yesterday to make it a bit easier for them to run around on our side of the fence and got a good close up look at them while on the mower. I left a few patches of longer grass where they can hide when they need to. As far as the other birds, our pet chickens seem to be healthy and happy but haven’t laid a single egg in about a week. They are eager to get snacks whenever we go out there, but don’t give anything in return. 

We are getting nearly 40 kWh per day from the solar panels this past week.  I checked and that was consistent with this time last year so I don’t really know if cleaning the dirt off the panels has made a lot of difference. We have decided to go onto monthly billing now instead of quarterly and I have been busy modifying my spreadsheet to take that into account. We now have access to a web page that shows a pretty graph of our usage but it is not real-time, more like a day or two old so I still have to check the meter myself to make an accurate bill prediction. It gives me something to do. We have had to use the wood heater here a couple of mornings recently as it got down to around freezing, but it helps with the electricity. There is no way a Heat Pump/AC could put out the same amount of heating BTU’s without costing a fortune. We still have plenty of wood and I pulled down a dead tree next to the front fence and I am burning some of it already, and have split up some of the other round wood and stacked it.. There is at least one other dead tree out in the back paddock which I may look into taking down soon as well for next winter’s supply.