ANPS Berries the Weather Radar

Today's walk went up - and I mean up - to the Canberra Weather Radar site in Tallaganda State Forest.  Here is the site; I think it just fits within Blogger's adult sites rules!
Getting the infrastructure stuff out of the way here is the excellent new bridge at Captains Flat: with an election on Saturday I am surprised there were no John Barilaro posters on it!
This is the Eucalyptus radiata forest at the start of the walk.
As Ros said in her email there were lotsa berries around.  Here are Pittosporum bicolor ...
.. Tasmannia lanceoloata (or Pepper bush)
.. Choretrum pauciflorum (technically a type of fruit known as a drupe rather than a berry)...
.. Polyscias sambucifolia ...
... Coprosma quadrifida...
 .. Dianella tasmanica - a particularly dense clump ...
.. and Leucopogon lanceolatus.
Let's move on to other seedy things: Arrenechthites mixtus 
.. and Gahnia sp.
OK.  There were some flowers: not many but quite nice.  The typical 'heathy 'thing of early Winter (although I found today quite OK temperature-wise others reckoned it was cold: wimps) Monotoca scoparia.
A nice example of Xerochrysum bracteatum plus butterfly (yet to be identified)
A close-up thereof, showing the proboscis to prove it is in focus.
Brachyscome spathulatum.
Helichrysum rutidolepis 
Although some Wahlenbergia gloriosa were seen they were uncooperative in the matter of open flowers.  This tiny jobbie was probably W. gracilis but from an abundance of caution will stick to Wahlenbergia sp.
This is a club moss!
A rock, well endowed with lichen!
A rather vertical rock, suggested by some to be a cliff, partially endowed with Pomaderris phylicifolia.
Nice scribbles on Eucalyptus pauciflora.
The blander bark of E. radiata.
I was surprised to find this car about 50m off the track.  Given the sapling growth around it, it had been there for some time.
The thought did cross my mind that there might have been a former person in it so went to check and (fortunately) resolved that question in the negative.
It was generally agreed that the presence of the baby seat implied it wasn't the owners of the car that stuck it there!

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