Odds and ends in Carwoola

This post is various things I photographed around the area today (and then added to over the month).  To some extent that makes it more or less a personal memoir rather than a great bit of journal-ism but someone might like it!

There are still a few Blue Finger Orchids around, 10 days after they first appeared, in contrast to last year where they seemed to appear and disappear within a couple of days.  Indeed one can never have too many images of these gems!
 Moving up the block a little I came across a small (say 2m square) carpet of Early Nancy's (Wurmbea dioeca).  They are the small white blobs in this image.
To give a better idea of the density of these lilies I have put a red circle on each flower!
A couple of days later we went past again and noticed that some of the female plants had been fertilised.
My attention was then drawn to a ringing ruckus of White-winged Chough calls.  This was just Choughs being Choughs but eventually all 9 of them flew into a Eucalyptus mannifera where one assumed the position on the communal nest.
Again a couple of days later, I got another shot, from a different angle.
On the lawn back at the house a pair of Eastern Rosellas found something to munch.
We have also got the first flowering Yam Daisies (Microseris lanceolata).  The first image shows a characteristic drooping bud
while the advanced flower follows.
As with the Blue Finger orchids, one can never have too many images of Tetrathecas.  This was a large clump found well up the property.
 My final on-property stop (on the day of initiating this post) was overlooking Whiskers Creek on to the Greening Australia direct seeding where the blossom on the Acacia decurrens and A. buxifolia stood out rather well.
I then had to go to Canberra and noticed en route the stalwarts of the Stoney Creek Bushfire Brigade assisting a landholder with a bit of clearing.
 In the city (or at least the suburb of Phillip) this graffiti caught my birdie eye.  Most unusually the taggers had got to it a little but it is still a good bit of work.

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