Wildlife and washoff

We have been getting some nice rain recently (although according to my correspondent Paddy Hanrahan we need more).  This has led to an outbreak of fungi along Widgiewa Rd.
Later in the day we came across a puffball ...
 .. and some field mushrooms.
The weather has also caused frogs to be very evident in and around the house.  On a recent evening I found these 2 sitting at the bottom of a window.
 My best guess at an ID for this one was a Broad-palmed Frog (Litoria latopalmata) but on listening to its call I have never hard anything like that on our property.  My second guess is Common Eastern Froglet (Crinia signifera) which is quite common in the area.  However a Frogwatch expert has identified it as Litoria verreauxii- whistling tree frog
 The other is a Perons Tree Frog (Litoria peronii) aka The Usual Suspect).
Interestingly, this morning 21 March we went to check that the water pumped satisfactorily to the main tank and found a Peron's Tree Frog sitting on the float in the big tank.  No idea how it got there!

The early morning (around 5am) of 21 March was notable for a pretty severe thunderstorm.  This dropped 7.6mm of rain on us in about 10 minutes.  A first consequence was scouring on the drive.
 A second consequence was washing a lot of charcoal flakes into the Creek!


It seemed that most of this black stuff came down from a small gully which I have never noticed running when it was vegetated.
Looking at a topo map suggests the catchment of this gully is as shown by the red dashed line.

Switching to Google Earth gives this polygon for the catchment of the gully, which measures 2.8Ha.  
 I hope in what follows I have got my zeroes right.  2.8 Hectares is 28,000 square metres and putting 7.6mm of water on to that gives 212.8 cubic metres of wet stuff.  This resolves to 212,000 litres of water arriving almost instantaneously on a baked, largely vegetation-free landscape.  No wonder there was a bit of run-off!

(Another way of looking at 212.8 cubic metres is an ice cube 6m to a side!)

After lunch another storm came through dumping 10+mm of rain in short order (taking the day's total to 17.8mm).  Here is the gully discussed above shortly thereafter.
A few metres upstream more water was flowing in:
A few more shots of the runoff.  This is runoff channeled around the garden which ends up coming down beside the drive.
 Heavy flow in the creek.
 Runoff from the Northern side of block coming into the Creek.
For various reasons I ended up later in the day on Captains Flat Rd where Whiskers Creek goes under the road.  The soot etc hasn't made it that far yet - although I suspect the liquid has an unusual chemical composition.  The first image looks North (towards the Molonglo) ...
 ... and the second South (ie towards home).


Comments

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