Getting the seal of approval

Today was very hot, getting up to 34o
There is also some excellent news.  The young koala we found last time has turned out to be a female and named Buttercup!  She is doing very well having doubled her weight.  Apparently she is a tad assertive but the carers seemed very pleased with her.

The first outing of the day was on to the deck to photograph the sunrise.
After the usual dog walk - remarkable for several conversations with locals, adding about 30 minutes to the walk - and finishing off breakfast we headed for the gun club track and Quarry Beach.  As the area around the Gun Club is shadeless we went there first.  It was also nearly birdless.

All the orchids here had finished but the were a few specimens of this bean.  I really have no idea what genus it is.  Thanks to Ian Fraser (see comment) for suggesting Sphaerolobium vimineum.  The plant was somewhat under 1m high which fits the description given in Fairley and Moore.  The inflorescence was a bit sparser than their example image, but I suspect mine was not yet fully out.  
 The stems/leaves look more like a monocot than a member of the family Fabaceae.

There were many chopped off tea trees flowering close to the ground.  Metaphors to do with snow are being resisted.
The following images are in more or less random order for some reason!   I have got a squillion Pelican images but this was such a nice pose there was room for one more.
eBird is offering a nice prize for people who put in 15 checklists including photo or audio files with their checklists.  So I have been doing so.  A Common Bronzewing was first ..
 .. followed by a pair of Chestnut Teal
Latish in the afternoon I went to Captain Stevenson's Point to play with my phone photography.  This Eastern Curlew took several goes to get well but I think is an adequate image for about 400m away.
 This one is a bit more pixcellated but still shows the diagnostic bill.
 For some reason this made me laugh when I found the image.
The Curlew is one of the species that is under threat (largely due to rapacious shonky land developers in North Asia) so it was good to see 4 of them in the Inlet.  The Australian Pied Oystercatcher is also under threat from humans due to dogs - both canines and the rhyming slang usage of "dogs meat = feet" - trashing their nests.  They are not uncommon in this area.
On the morning dog walk I had been impressed with the number of Scarlet Honeyeaters in some Callistemon bushes.  On my afternoon outing I decided to try photographing them.  As they dart about this was a matter of photographing an area of bush where I had seen them and then picking the bird out by examining the image on my computer.  Here is a male ....
 .. and here a female.
To illustrate the technique here is the full image for the female, with a helpful arrow to indicate the bird.  Even using the "window to fit the image" setting it took close peering to find her!
We now get onto to Pinnipeds.  The first time I used the joke about "seal of approval"was in 1996 when someone from Macquarie Island sent in this image of a leopard seal and a box of Census forms. ABS were still using the image (and joke) in 2006.
While at Captain Stevenson's Point a quite large Australian Fur Seal was hauled out on the rocks below.  My guess is it was about 2m long.
 Despite the wiki muttering about them being nervous this one paid no attention to me or others getting quite close.  (Another person showed me a photo of a terrier about 1.5m from the seal.)
 It must have got a bit hot as it dunked itself  back in the shallows ...
 ... before heading off to sea.

Comments

Ian Fraser said…
I can't get a sense of scale, but I reckon your Fab could be Sphaerolobium vimineum; if not it's nothing I've ever come across!
22 November 2016 at 10:10:00 GMT+11
Flabmeister said…
Many thanks Ian. I have added to pst above, but basically, bingo!

Martin
22 November 2016 at 19:43:00 GMT+11
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