Mango blooms

This year many of the mango trees around here were in bloom.  There is a venerable giant in the grounds of the playschool I work at, and a beautiful spreading mango tree too.  Then the mango trees in the grounds around my house too were in bloom, more than in the last couple of years.

For the last 15 years or so, many of the mango trees in our grounds were covered by a parasitic mistletoe kind of plant.  When branches of the tree, which had got squeezed by the parasite, were cut off, the tree died out after a bit.  Even repeated peeling off of the mistletoe did not seem to help.  The presence of the parasite kept the trees from flowering This year, I do not see the mistletoe on the trees, hence the mango blooms.  Since it has been so long since the mango trees bloomed, I had forgotten the scent.

The scent of the mango flowers is intoxicating;, sweet, slightly spicy, with the sourness of the raw mango.  At first, when I caught the heady scent, I wasn't sure which tree had bloomed.  Then when the hint of sourness came along too, as the flowers matured, I realised it was the scent of mango flowers.  Now, most of them are no longer visible.  Hopefully, there will be mangoes though, later on.

On a walk

                                                                        Elsa

My Elsa and I were out for a walk on a lovely tropical evening.  The sky was the colour of ripe peaches--all reds, oranges & gold and as we walked the light was fading.  Past some bushes, I suddenly heard a loud, quick rustling.  I hastily moved to the middle of the path--after all there are snakes around and dusk is their time to hunt!  But Elsa seemed quite unperturbed.   Then I saw a shape running up a nearby coconut palm--a glossy, black furry shape.  In the fading light, I couldn't quite see the head.  I thought it might be an Asian palm civet.  But on reading up on it, they are rarely pure black, usually having some kind of marking.  Anyhow, I'll go with the idea that it was a palm civet, since I haven't hear of forest squirrels coming around here yet, and the tail seemed too broad to be a cat's tail.  I stood and watched as it ran to the top of the coconut palm and then jumped on to the nearby tree and disappeared.

      Here is a picture of a palm civet taken a long while back