ANPS outing to Barracks Creek

The ANPS Canberra Branch Wednesday Walkers took themselves to Barracks Creek on the Southern edge of Karabar ( a suburb of Queanbeyan) on 13 April 2011.

One of the sights I photographed includes a giant killer spider (I leave it to the reader how to hyphenate that phrase) with a wrecked car in the gully behind.  Note: this is Queanbeyan!
This being the walk of a plant society I will put a few images of flowering plants at the beginning. For some reason I always put monocots first so here is a plume grass Dichelachne micrantha.  It was growing amongst some Stypandra and the leaves looked identical thereto.
I always have to remind myself that orchids are monocots.   Today's species was Diplodium truncatum, the Little Dumpy.  Although of the shape of the Greenhoods these are obviously brown!


Next we have the dicots: Acacia genistifolia, Goodenia hederacea, Coronidium oxylepis ssp. lanatum  (which apparently used to be Helichrysum collinum until some taxonomist needed a PhD topic or an extra published paper) and Styphelia triflora. I have shown an image of the last previously but they are pretty.
.

We now move out of flowering plants.  First stop in lichen: the first image showing a few fruiting bodies.
Next we have a few more fruiting bodies with some tendrils of Necklace fern Asplenium flabellifolium creeping through.  The spiky stuff is thought to be a moss, which is a level of detail where I am quite happy to leave things.
My final lichen shot shows some drier lichen hanging off some Pomaderris eriocephala - there has to be some use for Pomaderris!.
The Fungi are now rated as a Kingdom of their own, between Plants and Animals.  This apparently reflects fungi using chitin rather than cellulose as a strengthening molecule in their cell walls.  Here are some images from the day, beginning with Gymnophila junonius (a Fungimap target species).  Note the gills visible in the mirror.
Somewhat similar in appearance (until one notices the absence of gills - hopefully visible in the mirror) is Phlebopus marginatus (also a Fungimap target species).  I have seen these up to 50cm across the cap!
The final fungal feature is a Jelly fungus, Calocera sp.
In terms of Animals I offer three ants.  Roger kindly identified the first as a Jumping Ant (Myrmecia - there are 90 species in the genus).  The other two are included to indicated the range of styles available in the anteater's menu.  They were much smaller.
Birds were relatively few and far between, with only 18 species written down.  This probably reflects the relatively strong wind.

Comments

Denis Wilson said…
Love the "Little Dumpies".
One of my Orchid hunting colleagues refers to plants like your Pomaderris as "habitat".
A nice phrase which indicates his disdain for them.
Cheers
Denis
13 April 2011 at 17:31:00 GMT+10
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A tour of the West (part 1)

Image
A friend from my time in the UN sent me some photos of her family trip along Route 66.  They did this is a large camperwagon rather than a Chevy Corvette (apparently the kids jacked up about being offered a trip in the trunk).  It seems to have been a very good trip for them and most interesting to see their photos.  It was also educational for me, as I found out the German for rocking chair (schaukelstuhl, since you ask). They did 7200 miles in 30 days - a pretty serious bit of distance. This made me think of the trips we did in 1981 when living in Denver.  Frances initiated that idea by getting a book about the National Parks of the West  and marking interesting places.  I then worked out a route on a Rand-McNally Road Atlas (GPS was unknown then  - as were iPhones, personal computers and the internet).  From memory, taking nearly the whole Summer school holidays we covered about 10,000 miles in 70 days.  Here, approximately,  are our routes: That map comes from Google Maps (G
Read more

Insects from pine trees

Image
This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I recall years ago driving al
Read more

Satin Bowerbird gets ready for Lanigans Ball.

Image
Having some time to spare today I went to check the bower near "Tom Green's Seat" in the Australian National Botanic Gardens.  The bower was well occupied by what I take to be - based on the green plumage and yellow bill - a 5th or 6th year male Satin Bowerbird.  (With all these images, click on them for a bigger - unfortunately not better focused picture.  The shots were taken hand held on full zoom from about 10m distance into a fairly well shaded location.) He was very much engaged in adding to the construction. Then it seemed that another bird called from the bush above.  This led to a whole lot of activity: the most spectacular (and worst imaged) was a flash of the wings: The bird also did a fair bit of hopping around.  Given that it was still immature I called to mind the greatest traditional Irish song of all time: Diarmuid O'Leary and the Bards performing Lanigan's Ball .  This ditty refers to spending "6 long months at Brooks Academy learning
Read more