ANPS Rocks Gibraltar

Actually, judging by the stiffness in my legs this morning, Gibraltar may have rocked ANPS!

While there were some good plants around, and the previous (from 1998) plant list was doubled in length the big ticket item today was the granite tors and the scenery so we will kick off with that.

This could be titled the shape of things to come, being taken from the Dalsetta site and omitting most of the climb.
 A nicely gabled tor, with a view across the valley to the Bullen Range.
 This shot is a 180o panorama from the lookout platform. The aspect here starts to the NW and - by arithmetic - ends up to the SE.
This tor was taken from a rock platform close to the top. In fact it was about as close to the top as possible to get without ropes, pitons and a severe lack of imagination.  The stelate tor had a large ringbolt in the top which is fine, but to get to same would require ascending with fingernails jammed in a thin crack.  Possibly the image was taken from the site of a Freudian symbolism seminar.
There were several chances for capturing images through gaps between tors.  Due to the lovely sunny weather the lighting involved was awkward!
 Let us move on to the flowers which are more of less in the order in which I saw them.

Leucopogon virgatus.
Glycine clandestina
Hakea sericea
Kunzea parvifolia
 Ranunculus lappaceus.  Good numbers of this species were present in the grassy areas at the foot of the walk.  For some reason, the large number of kangaroos didn't seem to eat this.
Hibbertia obtusifolia:  The genus takes its name from George Hibbert (1757 - 1837), an eminent English merchant and amateur botanist.  A vernacular name for some members of this genus is 'guinea flower' presumably from a perceived resemblance of the flowers to the golden coin.  (IMHO when looking at the shape, to see the similarity it does well to remember that rum was another currency in early NSW and that amateur botanists were usually wealthy - perhaps too much so?)
Amyema miquelii: this was growing in a eucalypt as usual.  A little later we saw one on an Aacia dealbata.
Pomaderris andromedifolia.  One of the few plants seem in profusion.  The area around the summit was effectively a forest of this.
Pultenaea procumbens:  No idea why this was flowering so nicely when the masses on our property- 200m lower - haven't even started to flower yet.
 Eucalyptus dives.
Olearia lirata.  We found several specimens along the track but large patches were visible on an adjacent hillside.
On the way back down we found a second orchid species (I have put so many images of Glossodia major in other posts I didn't take images of that).  This finger orchid is Petalochilus carneus.
A close-up of the column.
 After descending the ball-bearing gravel trail while crossing a drainage line in a grassed area I noticed a few examples of Isotoma fluviatilis.
I am now moving out of sequence to group all images of grasst trees together. The area had the best collection of Xanthorrhea australis I have seen.  These first specimens, looking rather like redskins about to attack a wagon train, were on a ridge above the track.
Quite a bit higher up the trail a flowering specimen was right beside the track and had taken the trouble to grow with a view in the background.
 A hoverfly coming in for a snack.
This specimen encountered towards the end of the walk, and thus lower, had the highest proportion of open florets.
The next few images are more or less to do with animals rather than plants.  Obviously once a 'roo has bashed (or splashed) a path through the Phragmites, others follow.
As we started the ascent there were many spider webs on the ground.
Insects were more visible this walk than they have been for the past few walks.   A beetle (Carphurus sp. flower beetles - thanks Roger) feeding on Olearia.
 A Cunningham's Skink seen beside the track.  According to Ross Bennett's book the white spots meant it was a juvenile.

Several puddles in the bottom end of the walk were well endowed with tadpoles.  This puddle was possibly 40cm square and shrinking by the minute: I have no idea what the pollywogs were using for food but suspect few of them are going to achieve froghood.

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