ANPS goes crackers at Dalton

After Bang(o)ing North of Yass last week I thought we should continue the explosive theme by celebrating the date (Guy Fawkes Day, for those fortunate enough not to be of English birth) with a reference to Cracker Night.  We visited some sites off the Dalton- Rye Park Road (but not the Cemetery which has been mown within an inch of its life..

There was no evidence of a burnout, but parts of TSR 30- even quite a long way in - did look a bit like a wreckers yard.  Perhaps the Yass Pastures Protection Board, sorry SE LHPA. double sorry I do of course mean the wonderful SE Local Land Services who now manage the TSRs in our area will clear the rubbish out sometime this interglacial epoch. (Having a gate held closed by something more substantial than a bit of rope could be a start to keeping the bogans out.)
Enough with the negative waves, Moriarty!  If you like Donald Sutherland, follow that link!

OK: as Donald asks for it, here is something righteous and hopeful for a change!

I thought there would be a pyrotechnic display of orchids (as when we last visited visited the Reserve) and there was a massed display of Diuris sulphurea. They were everywhere in swathes.
Several specimens of Microtis parviflora were found.
Then a patch of purple labellum defines Stegostyla cucullata.  We'll get to another purple patch shortly!
Then a sun orchid.  A few folk questioned what the heck a sun orchid was doing opening a flower of an overcast, windy day at about 24oC.  I don't mind, here is Thelymitra juncifolia!

In case you wonder what the definitive "finger-like glands" of this species look like, check the dark lumps on top of the column in the following image!
Several T. pauciflora were also found.

The real fireworks were provided by Cheiranthera linearis.  Not a common species and I noted last week that it is supposed to be associated with gold-bearing rock.  If that is the case buy shares in whatever company has a tenement over this reserve.  They were everywhere in large numbers.
A somewhat straggly plant, but as always with Leptospermum the beauty is in the detail.  L. multicaule.
Ditto for Microseris lanceolata.
Let us have a foray into beans!  Triangular fruits means Daviesia and spiky stuff like that means D genistifolia.
'Lepto' means fine or slight, so finding that Daviesia (note the triangular seed again) leptophylla has slender leaves should be no surprise!
Gompholobium huegelii
This is a Hibbertia , which Ros has nutted out to be H. pedunculata!
This is what it looks like when all the petals have fallen off.  Really strange!
Lomandra filiformis coriacea
Patersonia sericea
Having spilt two cups of coffer, and grazed my his arm somehow, it was a small miracle that Mr Klutz didn't fall into the dam while photographing Triglochin multifructa.
A very interesting flower spike, well worth a dunking if one had turned out to be on the menu!
A pink form of Wahlenbergia stricta
Comesperma sphaerocarpum
We moved from the Reserve to Blakeney Creek North Rd.  The business here was a great display of Brunonia australis.
Again detail = beauty.
Fruiting bodies on lichen!
A mini-grasshopper on a Microseris linearis floret.  Everytime I tried to get a side-on shot the rotten thing changed position and this was the best I could do.
A Melyrid beetle on Velleia paradoxa
A bee (I think) on Wahlenbergia communis.
A cabbage white butterfly (far from cabbages, or any other Brassica).
 Pollanisus apicalis
As I implied at the start, a cracker of a day!

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