Mountain Creek Road weaves its magic again

The ANPS Wednesday walk today was intended to cover the three Travelling Stock Reserves (TSRs) along Mountain Creek Road, which (more or less) parallels the Murrumbidgee to the North-West of Canberra.  We found so much stuff at the furthest TSR (Cavan) that we passed on the middle one (The Mullion TSR) and finished with Tinkers Creek. There are so many photographs I will probably not comment much but let the speak for themselves.

To begin with the plants, giving pride of place to the Orchids.
Pterostylis pedunculata (Maroonhood:  A rather decrepid specimen but they are an early flowering species.
Pterostylis nutans.
Petalochilus carneus - individual and a group.


Petalochilus fuscatus: I am taking this as a different species due to the different shape of the dorsal sepal.


When we visited the area last year on 5 October there were a lot of Diuris around.  This year we only found a few, fairly battered specimens of D. pardina so I didn't spend bandwidth on them.

Here are some other photographs of flowers. 
Stypandra glauca
 Acacia paradoxa: almost the signature plant of Cavan TSR
 Arthopodium minus: a chocolate lily from Tinkers Creek.
 A great clump of Bulbine glauca from Cavan
 An unknown (at this stage) Carex sp from Tinkers Creek (actually in the Creek, not just the TSR!.
Coronidium scorpiodes: a little controversial since the taxonomists have invented this species by lumping two previously separate taxa.  Perhaps this is better left as Helichrysum scorpiodes?

Gynatrix pulchella:  I think this is the female plant.
 Hypoxis hygrometrica:  Golden weather glass.  The taxonomists seem to be having a field day (not that taxonomists ever go into the field) with this.  One authority says it is a member of the Liliaceae  - ie Lilies- while another reckons it is in Hypoxidaceae. I can spell 'lily' so will go with ANBG! 

 Indigofera adesmiifolia: the secret to splitting this one from the more familiar I. australis is the more obviously bipinnate leaves.
The flowers of Lomandra mutiflora
Pomaderis eriocephala
Pultenaea spinosa: one of many peas seen today.
Ranunculus lappaceus: if this was Seasame Street, this lovely buttercup would be sponsored by the letter 'U'!
Linking between plants and animals we have the Fungi.  A few non-photogenic agarics and bracket fungi were seen today but this weird item got a prize.  It also got identified by the nice people at Fungimap as Black Morel (Morchella elata).  We didn't pick it in the field because it is an Ascomycete and thus appears in a different section of the Field Guide.  Apparently it is edible: I would have to be pretty hungry to have a go at one of these.
Starting at the low-rent end of the animal kingdom I managed to photograph some interesting arthropods today.  If time permits I will do a bit more identifying later.



I will finsh with a couple of bird images,  Both are Gang-gangs, a cockatoo and the symbol of the ACT Parks Service (these images were taken at Cavan TSR, in New South Wales).  The first is the typically lairy (also spelt 'comical') looking male and the second the female, showing the attractively coloured breast feathers.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 rec...
Read more

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 ...
Read more

Maslins beach rules

Image
Anyone who was in Adelaide in the 1970s will be having a good nudge nudge at that title.  However the beach is really nice even though it is the haunt (in Summer ) of naked people.  (As an aside one of the 'van park staff was talking to some other guests and commented that the sights on the beach in Summer were not at all exciting.)  In April it is the haunt of seniors, many of them exercising their dogs, and thus a far more attractive place. Getting to the beach was a walk of about 1km along roads, from our van.  The second half of this went past a rather daggy looking paddock with many formed ridges in it, as though it was irrigated, although a water sources wasn't evident.  The paddock got interesting towards the end as some green parrots appeared.  Thanks to Frances eye for detail we have subsequently identified these as Elegant Parrots: my first lifer for 2014.    The locale is indicated by the red lines in this mudmap: Here are the bird...
Read more