A Phirst, Phutile, Fasmid Phollow-up

As the pin was pulled on the normal ANPS WW (given the naff weather we have been having so far this year, pin-pulling is becoming the knew knormal) today a suggestion was made that members may wish to try a stick-insect (family Phasmida) search instead.

This follows from the news that the stick insect photographed by Roger on our walk in Stoney Creek Nature Reserve a couple of weeks back was thought to be an undescribed species.  I was up for advancing science but unfortunately the weather forecast didn't improve so no-one else was game to come.  As I was going in to Queanbeyan (and thus passing the site) anyway I went ahead.

In the event the number of mm of rain that fell on me exactly matched the number of stick insects I found.  A big, fat round number: 0, zero, nada, zilch.  However there were a few interesting things around.

I didn't take any photographs of flowers (feeling lazy) but there were quite a lot of Brachyscomes, several Glycine and one thoroughly confused Bossiaea buuxifolia in flower.  That should keep the plant people happy!

Here are some invertebrates.

First up, two views of a Hoverfly(?)

 This is definitely a caterpillar!
This should be bog easy as it looks so strange.  However I have been totally unable to come up with a match.  The best I could do, from the shape of the head, is a lace-wing (but the wings do look right for that)! Roger Farrow has identified this as Poremus strigatus, Osmylidae: Porisminae (endemic monospecific sub-family) - and it is a lacewing!!

Spiders were everywhere.  Unfortunately the wind was blowing them around so photography  was not easy.
At one point I heard a weird bird call, similar to 5 Dollarbirds having a stoush.  On climbing a bank to look across the road I found:
.. wandering around a paddock.  Just what we need: another feral species!

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