Visitors to the birdfeeder Saturday

The magpies started to sing even before the faintness of dawn on Saturday and as the sky lightened cockatoos flew across the pale sky, all silvered by the oblique light, their squarking filling the air before dense dark rain rolled in with its drowning rain and hail stones. I enjoyed the sound of the rain and hail drumming on the roof, streaming in torrents from the gutters.

Hail stones falling in the garden

I could feel the tenseness in the darkened clouds and the waiting dry earth. For most of the day great storm clouds surged and roll over the landscape, turning sombre and darkly threatening, pouring more heavy rain.

The rain slackened and the drops became fewer and gentler and gradually the sun came out for a brief respite casting oblique bars of sunlight through the clouds. Late in the afternoon a golden streak of light lit the plain below us in a golden haze.

A streak of sunlight lightening the coastal plain below us

Ground doves scuttled through the undergrowth pecking at the fallen sunflower seeds and cockatoos paid us a visit for their evening snack departing as the twilight set in and the coastal plain slowly became invisible in the ever-encroaching darkness, the southern cross and its pointers began to glow in the night sky, slowly becoming brighter. The headlights of cars move along the roads below us as the dark and cold, closed down on Berwick for the night.