Various aspect of the local environment.

Yesterday (20 September) I went for a stroll in a relatively new Nature Reserve in the ACT.  It is called Kama and contains some really nice grassy-box woodland running down to the Molonglo Valley.  There are some really magnificent trees in there - which will be the subject of a later post I hope - and also a group of Brown Treecreepers.  I rather like this shot of a Treecreeper creeping up a tree!
There were also a few dragonflies about - very active and far too busy to pause for a portrait - and one attractive (in a rather restrained-palette way) moth.
I will attempt to ID the species later, but for the time being will apologise for the phrase "restrained-palette".  It is collateral (linguistic) damage from the Fred Williams show at the National Gallery.

Today was a COG mid-month walk which took us to Narrabundah Hill.  It is a hill, but some distance from the suburb of Narrabundah.  It used to be the site of a pine forest but that exploded in the January2003 bushfires so is now a regenerating area, surrounded by horse paddocks.  We saw quite a few birds but the only one  snapped was this Black-faced Cuckoo-shrike. 
It is (obviously) black-faced, but is neither a cuckoo, nor a shrike.  Aren't taxonomists wonderful?

On the way home - after an excellent en-route hamburger at the Yass Road takeaway in Queanbeyan - I saw this Bearded Dragon sitting in the road so stopped for a snap or two.

The first shot shows the way this species flattens-out as a threat display while the second shows the pleasant colour (refraining from 'painterly' references to tonality) and the detail of its scaliness.

On getting home I wandered up our property to capture the first example of Leucopogon virgatus to grace the block this year.





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