A Spring Day in Carwoola

Today (13/9)  was planned to be a Spring Day in Penrith twitching a Grey-headed Plover.  Unfortunately it turns out that the site concerned (Penrith Lakes) is officially closed to allow the horny sons of toil to set up for a headbanger festival next weekend.  Note that like many DAFt things - wooden shoes being an obvious example - it started in the country North of Belgium.

While some folk had been allowed on to the site I wasn't prepared to spend 6 hours driving to find that some Jobsworth OHAS goose blocked me from seeing the bird.  As I was taking the Jetta which doesn't have a bullbar some alternate access options were less readily available.  So I stayed home.  (Finishing this off, I note that there are no reports from the site for 13 September: either the eBird database is slower than usual to update - it wasn't for the birds I saw this morning - or the Penrith site was seriously shut today.)

Whatever, it was a lovely morning for a walk.
Back home the Acacia pravissima has started to hit its straps.
Here is a mixture shot, with some daffodils, Acacia and plum blossom.
You want more plum blossom?
Here is plum blossom with a bee in attendance. (I am unsure what the bees do on these trees as I have never seen a fruit on them.)
Almond blossom!
The Hellebores beside the drive are in full array now.
This is our half weeded onion patch.  (No petunias were evident although a volunteer lettuce was found as we finished the job off.)
Further up the block, Leucopogon fletcheri was in full bloom.

So was this, which I believe to be L. fraseri,
A Striated Pardalote spent a fair proportion of the morning calling loudly beside my tool shed.

The lower bird is a Wedge-tailed Eagle. The higher one is an Australian Magpie, about to attack the eagle.
I have added this on later (from 14/9) as it is a Spring thing.  Specifically a moth on our window one evening - I think a member of the family Geometridae.
Note the fringe on the trailing edge of the wings.

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