A chocolatey Sunday

I'll leave it to the readership to decide how that newly minted adjective fits on a scale from "rather pleasant" to "Super".  The word arrived as I have been munching on an Easter Egg I won in a raffle a few days ago (thanks Queanbeyan View Club!)!

Apart from The Egg the day also pretty good in the bird area.  We started by scoring 35 species on our morning walk around Western Karbeethong.  This included Bird of the Day which was a Cattle Egret grazing with some cattle in the pastures at the end of the settlement,

When I commented in the past about the difficulty of getting my camera to focus on that which I wished, rather than the background (or occasionally a small twig in the foreground)a helpful colleague asked about "manual focus".  Today I tried it out with a crepuscular Wonga Pigeon.  It is a bit tricky as the finger has to move from the manual focus button to the shutter button without losing the composition, but I think this is OK.  Certainly it is better than the automated offering!
That got me a bit cocky so I tried taking a shot of an Eastern Whipbird.
I don't think focus was the problem here: the red outline might help spot the birdie!
I was initially hopeful that the middle Oystercatcher might have been a tad more exciting but apparently a dark tip to the bill and drab legs just mean a young bird of the Australian Pied species.
We spent a fair bit of the morning in wooded or heath areas.  There really was very little in flower,  A small Leucopogon sp.
Possibly Pimelea sp.?
No idea, beyond dicotyledon!
A bean - perhaps a Bossiaea?
Acacia sp.
Correa reflexa.
Epacris impressa.  I have mainly included this shot as I usually get very poor images of this colour form: for this one I used the flash to try to improve things and it seems to have worked.
An orchid!
An orchid!!
An Orchid!!!

Ok so it is Eriochilus cucullatus but it was the only orchid we have seen to far!
In the afternoon we went to Bastion Point which was pretty well covered with family funsters from the caravan park.
This snap shows the bar at the mouth of the Inlet.  I reckon you'd need a fair incentive to take a boat out through that.
Some surfers were getting rides, but I didn't wish to hang around for them to get up.
Let me (nearly) finish today's effort, on what is after all a Christian religious holyday, with an adaptation of a quote about God's desires, from John Milton: "They also surf who only sit and wait."
I've stretched it out a bit with a photo from our final stroll of the day of a boat coming into the jetty just on dusk.
Shortly after this we were at the bottom of the street and a couple of bats were in the air so I stayed to see what would happen.  Within 2 or 3 minutes (at 1932)  there were 10s in the air circling over the roost.  5 minutes after that, 100s were in the air and a steady stream were heading out across the Inlet towards the flowering  Angophora pictured on Thursday's post.

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