Weather in an afternoon

1:57:44pm - a good Nor'west arch over the north-end of the city. The Nor'wester arch is an orographic cloud formation which has meant we've had warm muggy conditions today.



2:41:42pm - and the clouds forming over the southern part of the city are hinting that the forecast for a southerly change may be accurate.



3:54:52pm - a brief bit of sunshine lights up the Railway Station tower, Cadbury's, the hospital chimney, and one of the University Halls of Residence, but look at the solid black clouds. And yes by the time everyone was going home at 5pm it was pouring with rain!

Otago Museum Reserve

One evening ...



the next morning ...


and the evening of that same next morning. Autumn is most definitely 'seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness'.

Old Ideas

'Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories. They are habits, predispositions, deeply engrained attitudes of aversion and preference. Moreover, the conviction persists - though history shows it to be an hallucination - that all the questions of the human mind has asked are questions that can be answered in terms of the alternatives that the questioins themsleves present. But in fact intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandoment of questions together with the alternatives they assume - an abandonment that results from decreasing vitality and interest in their point of view. We do not solve them: we get over them. Old questions are solved by disappearing, evaporating, while new questions corresponding to the changed attitude of endeavour and preference take their place. Doubtless the greatest dissolvent in contemporary thought of old questions, the greatest precipitant of new methods, new intentions, new problems, is the one effected by the scientific revolution that found its climax in the "Origin of Species".'

Quotation from: John Dewey 'Darwin's Influence upon Philosophy', Popular Science Monthly, vol 75, pp90-98, July 1909.

Washed up

This spectacular group of stalked sea-squirts clinging to a mussel was washed up on the beach the other day. Their other name is sea-tulip and they are common in the southern part of New Zealand's South Island.



The long felxible stem can withstand quite a wave-bashing, but there were clearly just too many grouped onto this hapless mussel for it to survive the swaying over the last few days of turbulent weather. Pyrua pachydermatina lives just below low tide down to quite deep water, often in large quantities, amnogst kelp and other brown seaweeds. You can see them in the harbour too, and apparently they dominate the sub-littoral at Portobello.


The body is free of other critters but the brown tufts are bryozoans which are using the stem as a substrate.

see: Batham, E.J. 1956. Ecology of Southern New Zealand Sheltered Rocky Shore. Transacions of the Royal Society of New Zealand, vol 84 part 2, pp 447-465

Early autumn low tides

A couple of days ago, it was cold, windy and wet. The equinocial tides have been very low for the last week or so exposing the rocks at the seaward side of the St Clair salt-water pool.

The cold rainy windy conditions meant the gulls were not here at the sea-side. They have good sense. It also meant the coastal rocks, and kelp beds would be taking a battering. They were!

In The Stacks ...

'And sometimes even then, in the stacks of the Municipal Library, in the sound of dust, and the smell of decaying, aged flesh, he would open a book to dedicate himself anew. And he would stand shivering for the daring of the words, their sheer ejaculation.
On one occasion Waldo Brown had found:

In my dry brain my spirit soon,
Down-deepening from swoon to swoon
Faints like a dazzled moving moon.

The wind sounds like a silver wire,
And from beyond the moon on fire
Is pour'd upon the hills, and higher
The skies stoop down in their desire ...

He shut the book so quick, so tight, the explosion might have been heard by anyone coming to catch him at something forbidden, disgraceful and which he would never dare again until he could no longer resist. He looked around, but found nobody else in the stacks. Only books. A throbbing of books. He went to the lavatory to wash his hot sticky hands.'

Quotation from: The Solid Mandala by Patrick White, 1966 (Eyre & Spottiswoode)

Summer Shower

A view from the top floor of the University Library, one sunny day.


A day later, at almost exactly the same time.


A couple of minutes later the worst is past.


And after ten minutes it was back to sunshine!

Definitely Glass Half-full

'As he strode at full stretch, he found himself humming. He was alone in the fields, looked around to check, began to sing. It became a noise, a crush of sounds from chants and hymns, songs and the music heard in secret – all just one sound which matched his mood, which floated as he himself seemed to float through autumn fields. It was a song of himself. Everything seemed to be in harmony. Everything seemed good. The world was a blessed place, all things committed and flowing through him and through everyone. He saw that everything moved to a single purpose, everything was earthed in the grass beneath his feet, and it was as if he simply ceased to be but was part of all around him, the sky within his reach, air, earth, stones, trees, he was part of their song and they of his.'

Quotation from: Crossing The Lines by Melvyn Bragg. Hodder & Stoughton 2003.

Old Fern

Well to be more precise this is an old wall. It is about 3 metres high retaining a bank of earth. But it is home to several clumps of fern.

This (and the picture above) are Hart's Tongue ferns, Phyllitis scolopendrium, a European fern introduced into New Zealand and not very common. In Britain you can large stands growing in its natural woodland habitat, but here (in the Dunedin Town Belt) that niche is filled the NZ native Hound's Tongue Fern Microsorum pustulatum. The European Hart's Tongue prefers a limy soil, which is why it is growing on the mortar between the blocks of (probably acidic) volcanic breccia. It also probably accounts fro why it is relatively uncommon in the Town Belt.


I have been unable to identify this fern (and below). I can easily imagine that growing on this wall has stunted its normal growth, making deformed specimens that defy even close identification - sigh!

Harbour terns

'In the dark the old man could feel the morning coming and as he rowed he heard the trembling sound as flying fish left the water and the hissing that their stiff set wings made as they soared away in the darkness. He was very fond of flying fish as they were his prinicpal friends on the ocean. He was sorry for the birds, especially the small delicate dark terns that were always flying and looking and almost never finding, and he thought, "The birds have a harder life than we do except for the robber birds and the heavy strong ones. Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel? She is kind and very beautiful. But she can be so cruel and it comes so suddenly and such birds that fly, dipping and hunting, with their small sad voices are made too delicately for the sea".'

Quotation from The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

White-fronted terns are often seen feeding here at Wharf Street.