A walk round East Basin

Lake Burley Griffin is crossed by two bridges and is ended by Scrivener Dam.  This splits the water body into three sections known as West Basin (Scrivener to Commonwealth Avenue Bridge);  Central Basin (between Commonwealth and Kings Avenues) and East Basin (Kings Avenue to Dairy Flat)

Today we walked the 10km (approximately) around East Basin.  The route, done anticlockwise, is shown in this clip from Google Earth.
Although we wanted to do some birding at Jerrabomberra Wetlands it is no longer possible to park there without a risk to finding you car has been broken in to.  So we parked at the Canoe Club and schlepped our binoculars round the route.

The first birds were these vermin. 
I have no idea why the Parks people haven't converted them into pate or some other useful commodity.  Presumably they will only start to take notice when they have reached Myna levels of population. 

After crossing Kings Avenue Bridge we got to the site of a carpathon.  The gale that was blowing appeared to be limiting the amount of decarping being achieved,  This angler appeared to be handling the stress OK
So was this Black Swan, which seemed to be guzzling a junior anglers bait!
We left the Lake shore to take the most direct route we could find though the slums of Kingston.  As we past one group of apartment I noticed some interesting things about the letter boxes.

  • What happens with anything bigger than a standard envelope?  These people must spend as much time in line at the PO picking up their larger mail as they do at work or sleeping.
  • For some reason the boxes for #s 2 and 7 are out of order.  I saw this also on another block so it isn't a one off mistake.  But what could be the rationale for this?
  • Some years back I looked at the incidence of No Junk Mail stickers across a few suburbs of Canberra and attempted to find some correlations with Census data.  The one that worked was level of educational qualifications.  Areas with a lot of stickers (>60% of boxes) had a high proportion of people with tertiary quals.  A rate of 3 stickers for 21 boxes would equate to most people in the area finding 3rd grade the best 3 years of their lives.
We pressed on to the Wetlands and found a few species of birds.  I thought this Darter interesting as it appears to be mud-stained, which I have never noticed before.

After seeing a very noisy fledgling Eastern Koel being fed by its Red Wattlebird host (and having to leave a hide due to arrival of the most unpleasant bunch of mini-bogans I have ever seen there) we left the Wetlands and walked down Dairy Road.  That was enlivened by seeing 3 Sacred Kingfishers on or around some phone lines.
All up we recorded 34 species of birds.

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