Another lovely day ...

.. but Phil Collins wasn't present, so not Paradise.  As foreshadowed, neither was electricity.  Grrrr!!!!

This post is a bit thematic, rather than following a timeline.

Early in the day the local chapter of Friends of Flathead were off on their recruitment mission.

 We went for a walk effectively from Betka Beach to Fishermans Point.  At one of the lookdowns Frances reckoned this could be called Wave Rock.  A good idea as it does look quite a breaking wave.

My alternate suggestion would be Elephant Seal Rock, as it reminds me of a bull seal getting ready to launch into combat.  However, such seals are a long way from here.

This is a view from close to Fisherman's Point, looking towards Mt Imlay.

Finishing off the water theme here are some lads coming back in from the flathead competition.

Moving on to birds here are a couple of shots of the South end of a Pelican heading North.

A Whistling Kite cruised by, looking down to see if there were any flathead left.

Great Cormorants near Fisherman's Point.

Grrr.  A Spotted Dove along the Inlet on our morning walk.  I do think they should have kept the name Spotted Turtle Dove, for the appropriateness of the acronym!

An Australian Pied Oystercatcher taken using my phone and telescope.  A bit pixcellated but given that the bird was moving and 600m away its not too bad.

On our last visit there were a lot of shorebirds around, but not on this visit.  Possibly this was because the campground is beginning to fill so folk were walking and boating out into the estuary.

Today's reptile is again a Lace Monitor.  This one was about 3/4 the size of yesterday's specimen.

I did see another reptile near the house when I didn't have my camera.  About 25 cm long. black on top and red underneath.  The average number of legs per reptile dropped to 2.

Plants!  A Melaleuca flowering in the heathland.  The faintly mauve colouring isn't at all obvious until one gets really close.

A Tea-tree, probably Leptospermum sp.

I am pretty sure this is a Prostanthera sp, or mint bush.  I'm confident the fuzziness is hairs on the petals not poor focus!

The only orchids seen today were again the little pink jobs.  My initial thought was Petalochilus carneus but then I realised the position of the dorsal sepal was not correct for that species and on consulting our orchid reference book it turned out to be Stegostyla congesta.  Or you could put the genus in either case as Caladenia.

I have received off-line advice that the labellum was further off the mark of C. congesta than the dorsal sepal is for C. carnea (or P. Carneus  - I love the crap of declension).  So I revert to Petalochilus carneus.

There were many multi-flowered and large Thysanotus tuberosus along the walk.

A native bee on a 'Daisy', possibly Ozothamnus sp.  It was interesting to look closely and realise that each of the florets was in fact open, rather than being in bud.  Judging by the amount of pollen on the bee's back leg it was collecting a lot, but didn't seem to be depositing much of it!

I'll conclude with a small rant about (what a surprise) taxonomists.  What I realised was that the fixation on (obsession with?) DNA sequencing forces everyone to assume that the be all and end all of interest in plants is the relationship between taxa and how they have diverged over time.  In the case in point of the finger orchids I wasn't at all concerned about that but wanted to identify the species.  So knowing the structure was that of a 'Steg' (not the Stig) made it much simpler to track it down than searching through a far longer list of lumped Caladenias.