Touring Canberra in Autumn

This post will cover at least a couple of tours of parts of Canberra.  It will be a bit of a hodge-podge of themes, covering the built and natural environments.

3 May: Yarralumla and Jerrabomberra Wetlands
The first part of this tour - undertaken on a Mountain bike (MTB or en Francais VTT) was to check out the environs of Red Hill for an ACT Veterans (ACTVAC)  running event.  This turned out to confirm the unsuitability of the venue for that event on a few grounds:

• the ACT Government had blocked off the only good parking area and put gates across the tracks to keep out trail bikes; and
• the course was sufficiently steep and rough that members of ACTVAC would wail and gnash their teeth about the nastiness of the course.

I ended up close to the suburb of Yarralumla where many of the Embassies of Foreign Governments are located  In view of the events announced on 2 May I thought I would go and see what the situation was at the home of what John le Carre refers to as "the cousins".  Not a great deal: I didn't stop to take any photos since I only had 2 hours to spare - the explanations could well have taken a lot longer than that.

However I did pass by a couple of diplomatic establishments with some interest.

The first was the Embassy of Finland.  This showed the level of architectural interest one would expect from Finland. (Also linguistic interest with the sign in English, Finnish and (I think) Swedish.

Moving on down the road I came to the NZ High Commission.  Being keen to move away from stereotypes they had corrugated iron cows on the lawn out front.  Not a sheep in sight!

 Given the presence of a lawn mower I am not sure these bovines are up to the job.  I also noticed a magpie perched on the rump of the leftmost cow.

As far as I could see it had not passed a comment on the latest Bledisloe Cup results.

Moving along towards Jerrabombera I passed through Bowen Park where many white cockatoos were disporting themselves.  It emerged that all three local species were present, I think feeding on fallen acorns.  I didn't photograph the Sulphur-crested Cockatoos .  This first image is of a Long-billed Corella (note the red around the bill and neck).

 The nearby Little Corellas were engaged in synchronised eating (front pair) and courtship (back pair).  There were a lot - perhaps 100 - of these around.

After this pause I finally got to the Wetlands.  The first birds I noticed here were 6 White-faced herons perched on power lines.

Why is this so you ask?  Because some ideologist has removed the willows in which they used to roost.

Of more concern to me is the large cluster of waterlilies: very invasive, but not removed. They have left the willows on mudbanks etc where they can't reach without getting their feet wet.  One of these was decorated by a Whistling Kite.

May 5: Tour de Basin de l'Ouest (in English, West Basin of Lake Burley Griffin)

We decided that we would have a long walk, around the West Basinn of Lake Burly Griffin on the bike path. OK' if you want to be a policy tosser the Multi-use path.  The route was a short 10 miles or 16km.

We had some doubts about how this would travel with the small dog (would she cause chaos with other users of the track?  would she collapse after 10km and have to be carried in my back-pack/) but decided to press on. Cutting to the chase it was a great walk and the small dog was definitely going better than those she owns at the end.

In terms of nature blogging the highlight was finding some (3) Fly Agarics (Amanita muscaria) in the cork oaks near Scrivener Dam.  Given that we found some thousands of these in the cork oaks a bit further from the lake last year that was nice but not surprising.  I wrote down 24 species of birds - all quite expected - as we wandered around. 

Most of the foliage has fallen off the deciduous trees, which made a nice scent in the area plus some good sounds as the smallest member of the team waded through.  However it did cramp the photo ops.

The human interactons were interesting and a little variable:

• Many people were using the bike path but all  -bar one - were very congenial in their use of bells or yells and generally pleasant folk.  The exception was a female cyclist who nearly took out a pedestrian (not one of us) by completely failing to look out at an intersection.
• We met up with a bunch of ladies visiting from North Shore Sydney who were riding around the lake and kept getting spatially misplaced (aka, lost) looking for a good coffee.  They explained they weren't used to the bush.  A thoroughly charming group: I hope they good a good Java somewhere!
• We went into a dog run to let Tammy have a gallop off the lead in the small dog area.  All went well until some female turned up with a whippet which immediately went for Tam: I had been dubious about this other mutt so (a) had Tam on her lead- useful as she was quite willing to take on the miner's pet; and (b) gave the whippet a good clip on the scone.  This diverted the whippet to start barking at dogs in the big run so we split.
• On thinking about this I concluded the owner of the whippet knew it was an asocial dog so wouldn't put it in the big-dog area as it would get get shredded.  She drove a fancy car and was too well dressed to be a bogan, so I needed a new word and decided to just replace the 'b' with a 'p' for Posh (not you Ms Beckham) giving a pogan!

 Despite this nerkess leaving a bad taste in most of our sensory organs it was, as I said earlier a good day.