My impression (supported by my 6 year records) for this area is that the last several months have been rather dry. An article in todays SMH confirms that thought with these two spectacular charts.
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...
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...
An excellent day! We had a very easy drive in to Deakin, despite the early start and set off on time. It was a tad disquieting to find a couple of overweight cyclists taking up the whole road going down into Urriara Crossing. There were quite a lot more of them just over the Crossing. Apparently they were heading for Sydney, and had chosen a scenic route. Some of them must have been from overseas as they didn't which side of the road to ride. Others were on the right side of the road (just) but averse to the soft shoulder. Stone the crows - at the end of Fairlight Rd (about 5km after the Crossing) they all seemed to be having another rest period. Fortunately we were able to get past them all and head off to Taemas. The business there was spotting the limestone outcrops, forming the eastern side of the anticline of which we were to see the Western side at Wee Jasper. After Crossing Mountain Creek many more outcrops were visible on the lower L...
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