Homewards bound

This covers our last day at Malla(old Coot)a and the trip home.  The first few images are the result of continuing playing around with digiscoping from Captain Stephenson's Point, primarily with zooming on the telescope rather than the 'phone.  Unfortunately no great rarities.

A bunch of Crested Terns loafed on a sand bar  ...
.. while an Australian Pied Oystercatcher organised the feathers.

Our recreational walk (as opposed to exercise walk) was to the Casuarina Walk - or as we call it after finding Buttercup there - the Koala walk.  Therewere a few flowers out along the track.  Very close to the start we found the first orchid of the trip.  Not very open, nor much in focus, it was Dipodium punctatum, a Hyacinth Orchid.
Brachyscome spathulatum.
Thysanotus tuberosus
To be named later, as Schelhammera undulata!  Thanks Ian.
Wahlenbergia sp.
On the last day we did our usual short walk to Bucklands Jetty.  As we left the house some Rainbow Lorikeets were grabbing some early rays.
Bucklands homestead was graced by a great Jacaranda.  (Down here they flower after uni exam time, unlike Brisbane where they were hated by Uni students as a result of that temporal coincidence.)
A second orchid: I think this is D. roseum, the "usual" Hyacinth Orchid.
We went home via Eden to stock up on smoked goods from the Eden Smokehouse.  Fortunately we rang first so reserved, basically, their stock of available spicy hoki and chili mussels.  Over at the wharf a lot of the fishing fleet were in: in a couple of weeks a few berths are likely to be occupied by withdrawals from the Sydney- Hobart yacht race.
We experimented by coming home up the Mount Darraugh Road from Pambula via Wyndham.  It was a bit slower than Imlay Rd or Brown Mountain but had very pleasant scenery including a few sightings of Superb Lyrebirds.  At - or indeed, thanks to advice from a garbo, just after Cathcart - we swung onto Black Lake Rd to check that water body for birds. Here is the attractive sign...
.. and here the Lake.
There were a few waterbirds around including 26 Coot.  A drop from the several hundred here in dry times but at least there were some.

A most interesting sight was the mass of large insects caught in webs on the dunny.  My photo of the mass of insects didn't happen, so I will take a snap of Frances art sample later.
A (former) dragonfly was also evident.
Finishing up where we started, the Big Dipper is now all black.  Still speed restricted as the armco is still being installed at the bottom.

Comments

Ian Fraser said…
I reckon your "to be named later" is Lilac Lily Schelhammera undulata.
22 December 2016 at 14:47:00 GMT+11
Flabmeister said…
Thank you. You've saved me a lot of searching!
24 December 2016 at 05:29:00 GMT+11
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 our routes: That map comes from Google Maps (G
Read more

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 recall years ago driving al
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 birds: The view from the top of
Read more