A walk up Palerang Rd
We seem to be getting into a pattern of taking a longer walk mit hund on Saturday afternoons. Today we went to Palerang Rd in Tallaganda State Forest wheer we hoped to find orchids and colourful fungi. This is quite close to home and apart from discovering that
We began by exploring a creekside area where we have previously found Diplodium sp and Spiranthes sp. Alas the cupboard was bare of orchids. However these Dianella tasmanica fruit were quite appealing.
Further up the road - and up was certainly the appropriate description - we noticed a large clump of Clematis, justifying its vernacular name of Old-man's Beard.
The overall habitat was very pleasant to walk though on a beautiful Autumn afternoon.
While I regret that it is State Forest and thus these trees are likely to be subject to the tender ministrations of businesses servicing the insatiable Japanese need for toilet paper and the Chinese need for cardboard (to ship stuff back to Australia) at least we can walk here with the small dog. So that is a temporary positive.
The only orchid we saw on the walk was a Dipodium roseum (Hyacinth orchid) which was well past its use-by date. At about 1100m it was also above the described elevation.
Once we got to a level bit of terrain (actually on Bald Hill Fire Trail) we came across a flowering epacrid. This is Monotoca scoparia.
A bigger flower was that of Xerochrysum viscosum. These are also well used but would have been spectacular a few weeks ago.
Birds were few and far between but on the way back down Frances used her new binoculars to good advantage and picked up two male Flame Robins. Always a beautiful sight. Less attractive but still good to see at this stage of the season was a Fan-tailed Cuckoo perched quietly nearby. Decent photographs were not available.
On getting home I had a cleansing glass of red wine. On getting up from this Frances noticed that I had a large red patch on the back of my grey shirt, which nicely matched the red patch on the beige cover of the chair in which I had been ensconced. The usual suspect was located on my strides and transferred briefly to our deck.
It may appear flat in that image, but it soon became a lot flatter!
There were quite a few fungi around, but not the profusion evident on our place. As they were all variations on the theme of light brown agarics or boletes no images were taken.
So basically a very pleasant quiet walk, which we will do again.
- one of the bends on the way is extremely corrugated; and
- I can still apply opposite lock quickly when needed
We began by exploring a creekside area where we have previously found Diplodium sp and Spiranthes sp. Alas the cupboard was bare of orchids. However these Dianella tasmanica fruit were quite appealing.
The only orchid we saw on the walk was a Dipodium roseum (Hyacinth orchid) which was well past its use-by date. At about 1100m it was also above the described elevation.
Once we got to a level bit of terrain (actually on Bald Hill Fire Trail) we came across a flowering epacrid. This is Monotoca scoparia.
On getting home I had a cleansing glass of red wine. On getting up from this Frances noticed that I had a large red patch on the back of my grey shirt, which nicely matched the red patch on the beige cover of the chair in which I had been ensconced. The usual suspect was located on my strides and transferred briefly to our deck.
There were quite a few fungi around, but not the profusion evident on our place. As they were all variations on the theme of light brown agarics or boletes no images were taken.
So basically a very pleasant quiet walk, which we will do again.
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