More doings in Carwoola

You know it is getting towards Summer when interesting moths appear.  This one was sitting on our bedroom floor this morning, after a spell on the pelmet. It was about 10cm across the wings.
Starting with a scan through Zborowski and Edwards got me the link to the Catocalinae subfamily within Noctuidae and a run through Donald Hobern's images for that subfamily soon got me to Dasypodia selenophora  with the intriguing vernacular name of "Southern Old Lady Moth".  Que?

 Towards the other end of the size bracket for insects, I went to check on the progress of a humungous Microtis sp and found it hadn't opened yet.  However a fruit fly was visiting.  Those familiar with the size of Microtis flowers will realise this fly is not a giant.  To assist the rest of you, the florets are about 3mm long, which makes the fly ~2mm in body.
Later in the day some interesting birding happened.  A female Pallid Cuckoo had us confused when it flopped out of a tree on to the ground where it walked around for quite some distance.
It turns out that they feed on the ground quite frequently and presumably that is what this lady was up to.  

We got several breeding records including 3 White faced heron chicks in a nest.  They don't stand out very well - probably not an accident - so I have put a red dot more or less on the end of their beaks.
A Little Eagle kept its eye on us from about 10m up in a tree.
Some Eurasian Coots have raised red-head chicks.
Several days later (and after several fruitless visits in the interim) I found that the flowers on the monster Microtis were beginning to open.

The crinkle cut edges of the labellum label this as Microtis unifolia. 

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