Where we have been

This blog has been rather quiet recently as we have been off on a trip West.  The main destination was Lower Eyre Peninsula and all is contained in the pages of the Tick Magnet blog.

The main thrusts are birds, plants (including some nifty orchids) and old buildings.

A few days are yet to be finalised, and will be updated in the next day or so, but by and large it is done and dusted.

Comments

Denis Wilson said…
Hi Martin
In your plants of Eyre Peninsula #1, the " Unknown lurid plant" is some sort of Grevillea (almost certainly)
The "pollen presenter" and the cup-shaped bits with the anthers are certainly Proteaceae.
Cheers
Denis
1 August 2012 at 17:49:00 GMT+10
Flabmeister said…
Thanks Denis. I will try toget it closer - we hadn't thought of Grevilleas!

Martin
1 August 2012 at 18:35:00 GMT+10
Anonymous said…
Interesting to read your trip report. I am originally a crow-eater and have been to many of the places you did - was born and raised in Gawler (near the Barossa Valley), which you reported on. That town isn't as nice as it used to be when I was growing up - but maybe that's the cast of nostalgia. Or maybe not - a friend's son recently hanged himself under a bridge there, and I have to say it's a desolate place to die.
On a brighter note, I lived in one of those old sandstone houses with the cast iron accessories (I'm sure there's an architectural term to describe them) - deliciously cool in summer but appallingly freezing in winter. I'm impressed you braved the South Australian winter - you're braver than me. But then you live near Canberra :)
2 August 2012 at 13:59:00 GMT+10
Flabmeister said…
Thanks for the comment Joy. The folk of Gawler seemed to be doing a good job of retaining their history. It seemed that the appalling sprawl of Adelaide is getting close to the Southern boundary of the town: that will probably complete the downwards slide!

When we lived in Adelaide I recall a day in 1982 when the temperature got below freezing for the first time ever. Some galoots went swimming in the sea as it did so.

However we found it pleasantly warm in the spots we visited this time. This may be because we had a sanguinary cold non-Summer and have been consistently getting -3 to -5 this Winter
2 August 2012 at 14:38:00 GMT+10
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