Visiting a couple of tourist attractions

On 18 February we visited the Australian National Botanical Gardens, primarily to look for artistically curled leaves and butterflies, and Cockington Green, primarily to have a look at the place at our own pace.

The leaves will appear here in due course when they have been dealt with artistically.  The only interesting butterfly seen was a McLeay's Swallowtail which did not pose conveniently for a snap.

One of the roos did pose displaying both a collar - showing it has been darted in a trial of contraceptives - and a pink ear tag.  Both collars and pink eartags can be anticipated in larger numbers in Oxford Street on 5 March but I don't think contraception is exactly needed there.

Going up the Rainforest gully we encountered a tree surgeon doing his stuff.

Failing to find any photogenic butterflies we went to check the Gippsland water dragons in the Rock Garden.  I'll start with the scales on the back of a dragon's head

They have a colourful throat.

And long pointy claws.

I am assuming that the light basic colour of this one is somehow related to it having its tail in the relatively cool water.  Or perhaps it is just a light dragon!

We then moved on to Cockington Green.  The first model is of the main building and is set up to demonstrate the impact of 1:12 models

On our previous visit the most obvious ethnic group were large numbers of Indian families.  Today nearly all the visitors were Chinese, and appeared to be travelling by coach.  Quite a few of them had selfie sticks.

The change I noticed was the luxuriance of the flowers.  Checking back to the previous post, it does look as though they were more obvious on this day.

I expect to visit at least once more to see when the place looks like in Winter.