An Autumnal tour of the Plain

Feeling like getting out a bit today I fired up El Camion and went for a rumble round the Hoskinstown Plain to see what birds could be seen.  Not a great number was the answer.  There were quite a few Flame Robins around but none of the breeding plumage males were cooperative.  This 'brown bird' posed nicely however.
The basic problem seems to be lack of water.  Not only has the grass gone dry and brown before ant really serious frost, but the water level in this dam is about 1m below what it was this time last year.
My guess is the small brown beast would have been almost totally under water in March 2012!

Getting the livestock together these Alpacas probably think they are back on the altiplano!
 A very obvious vegetation form on the Plain is the hawthorn bushes lining the road (and where the land owners aren't vigilant, invading the paddocks).
While they are clearly weeds, and thus a bad thing  have noticed them providing cover and nest sites for small birds and roosts for Brown Falcons and Eastern Barn Owls.  At this time of year the berries ...
.. can attract flocks of Gang gang Cockatoos, but they were not evident this afternoon.  The only birds hanging out in the hawthorns that I could see were a few Common Starlings (boo, hiss).

More Autumn colour was added by this magnificent row of elms near the Briars property.
 Further russet colour was added by this fox.  He was lying facing the road in some longish grass but I stopped and raised the camera he bolted.  Hopefully to deal with some rabbits!

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

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 birds: The view from the top of
Read more