Plants of the ACT get confused (ANPS Mt Taylor)

The walk for the stalwarts of ANPS (ACT Branch) today was set for a part of Mt Taylor.  Exactly which part was to be resolved according to how folk felt.

My expectations for this walk were a little modest: I was expecting to take lots of images of things in bud with perhaps a few flowering eucalypts to give some colour.  So here are some pictures of things in bud.

Acacia melanoxylon
 Brachyloma daphnoides
 Melichrus urceolatus
Then we started to find an astonishing number of plants in flower, that in most cases should not be in flower for some months. 
Leucopogon virgatus
 I wandered over to a soggy patch, hoping to find some sundews (Drosera sp).  I did better than that by coming across an Utricularia dichotoma.
 Casting around the area, other members then found a lot more of these bladderworts (another carnivorous plant.  Here is one of several clumps.
 At first glance this Isotoma fluviatilis looked white - but on getting the light right it was blue (and charming)!

I cannot understand what Hardenbergia violacea was doing flowering at this time of year!

 We found two species of Hibbertia.  First H obtusifolia ..
...  and then H. riparia.
 To complete my astonishment we then found some Brachyloma daphnoides in flower.

Before leaving plants we found quite a few Kurrajong trees.  Here are the leaves, with the nice Autumn sun shining through and the three trunks of the biggest specimen

Close examination will show a seedling growing in between the trunks.

There were even a few insects around.  A grasshopper (many of these flitting in front of us as we walked); a Meadow Argus; and an attractive(!!) cockroach.


Fungi were few in number.  This Coral Fungus was the top specimen.

Birds were not great in number (are they ever in grasslands?)  However a pair of Wedge-tailed eagles caught our eye.  One of them did a great fly past
culminating in a "shut the wings and power dive" display flight.  It them perched nicely for a snap at the extreme end of my camera's zoom range!   Judging by the beautiful golden nape this bird is <5 years old so the display flight could be punching above its weight!
I was taken with the patterns made by the power lines.  From other angles, both horizontal and vertical, they are obviously not so interwoven.

Comments

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