ANPS sees white on Black Mountain

Unfortunately it wasn't the white of Stegostyla sp. but read on a bit - OK quite a bit - to find out what it was!  There are a couple of rants to begin with, but we soon get to plants!

We were greeted by this very nice sign.
As always I wonder how much they pay for the design, fabrication and installation of such boffo.  My guess is that it could cover the cost of a few staff years of Ranger effort to prosecute litterers, trail bike riders and other degenerates.

So what do you do with a Nature Reserve?  What else than run a squillion power lines through it.
In case you wonder about the soil profile in Black Mountain here it is.
Possibly the term 'soil gets stretched a bit there, but I don't have to dig it, and the plants seem to like it which is the main thing.

As we are getting close to Wattle Day (and there are celebrations advertised on the net by the Friends of ANBG) I will start the floriferosity with some Acacias.  The commonest one today was A buxifolia.
 A. gunnii was, as usual, keeping a low, but attractive profile.
A. genistifolia.
 A. dealbata
 Some purple beans were evident all through the area (at least the bits that haven't been incinerated recently - rant - me rant?  surely not).  Hardenbergia violacea.

Hovea heterophylla
Here is some white, although Leucopogon fletcheri was not what led to the title of this post.
 Neither was L. attenuatus.
 And Melichrus urceolatus is more cream than white (apart from the fertilised bits which are an attractive shade of orange).
We now move into the sphere of things with rather inconspicuous flowers.  My guess is that if you are reading this on a 'phone screen this flower of Omphacomeria acerba will be about 10x life size.  Using a laptop computer - many times life size.  But it is cute.
Luzula densiflora is usually seen as a rosette only, but this one had some nice flowers.
 I think this is the male version of Phyllanthus hirtellus!
 Drosera sp was enjoying lunch (and supper and breakfast -  for the next several days).
Hakea decurrens.
You can run, but you can't hide.  Pomaderris will always get you: in this case P. intermedia.
 Finally a yellow and red bean: Dillwynnia phylicoides.
I was trying to take a snap of a native bee on this Eucalypt blossom but:
  1. missed the insect; and 
  2. forgot to ID the tree!
 This is not Grevillea alpina!
 The traditional Stypandra glauca.
 A non-traditional Stypandra glauca.  That is the white flower I have been banging on about!
Suggestions were raised about there being uranium in the soil to cause the mutation, but I'd rate it equally likely it got zapped by a burst of waves from the Tower!

Fortunately we did find some greenhoods to make up for the lack of not-Caladenias.  Bunochilus umbrinus

This shows - very badly - the biggest bunch.
 I have obviously got right out of touch at snapping orchids.  We found quite a few Pterostylis nutans.
There is going to be a good display of Glossodia major in a few weeks.  This hairy job was the most advanced we saw.
Some interesting moss sporangia.
The only fungus I noticed today was this Stereum sp. 

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