A run with my friends in Queanbeyan

Some years ago The Committee decided that defining a run by yourself as a run with your friends was an official Joke.  I think that made the total number of official Jokes about 2.  The first one was established before I became a member of caucus, let alone The Committee, and was something to do with graders near Half-way Hill on Pipe Flat Rd.  The third official Joke was to do with Roast Lamb (rated as the only thing better than a 32km rain at 4oC with light rain and a 30kph Southerly.).

So today a quorum was 1 as I took myself off for a waddle along the mighty Queanbeyan.  For such events I take my phone and record bird sightings as I go: this tends to slow the run down a bit, but I have 90 minutes before Frances has finished her Pilates Class so that's alright.  I also take a few snaps with the phone, but they aren't great art when the light is scungy as it was today.

Birds were relatively thin on the ground until the last part of the outward leg when I came across 39 Australian Wood Ducks, 24 feral pigeons ...
(with 2 Eastern Rosellas  if you look closely) and 34 Galahs.
 On my way the Ducks were a bit agitated due to a white cat running around.  It jumped back into a yard before I could find something to heave in its general direction (such as a rock).  Further along I noticed for the first time - in about 70 runs on this course that the small park with the two-stall sacred site is called Glebe Park That is currently the site of a flowering gum tree, which I think is possibly Eucalyptus leucoxylon.  Its very pretty and very popular with Red Wattlebirds.

 About 300m further on the traditional diverges from a pure out and back to cross to the opposite side of the River.  This utilises the Suspension Bridge, originally built to allow nuns to cross the River when it was in flood.  Here is the Mighty Queanbeyan in somnolent mood and also showing the crappy weather.
 The main reason for this snap was not to show the infrastructure of the bridge but the ridge in the distances up which yesterday's stroll went (its about 250 vertical metres).
 Nearing the end I encountered a flock of 66 Little Corellas giving some beak to sundry roots in the lawn.
 Then a little further I logged the only Red-rumped Parrots of the outing.
All up I recorded 27 good species of birds and a domestic Mallard.

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