Good Moon rising

I thought I'd adapt a Creedence Clearwater Revival tune as the title of this post.  In fact there are two moon risings as I had published the post for 29 April before taking this image of the moon well risen on that date.

Some 12 hours after that moon rose the sun followed it.  I was a tad surprised where the sun came up along the horizon.  I was expecting it to be about the position shown by the purple arrow, but it was actually at the red arrow.  Of course I should have known it moved over the course of a year but this still surprised me.

Here is a wide view of the area at the purple arrow: nice colours.

Good puffy clouds in close-up.

Unfortunately that's all I got.  However the Koala was happy to see the sun rise at the red arrow!

On our walk into town the spoonbills weren't concerned about the sun.  They were groping in the lagoon for whatever they could find to eat.

Our second walk of the day was the Heathland walk (thanks ebird for this track image).

This covers a wide range of habitats, starting in eucalypt woodland, emerging into heathland, a nice walk along the beach to the Betka estuary, coastal dunes with Banksias and Acacia and then some Melaleuca forest back to the heathland.   In terms of birds the excitement is whether we'll see any Hodded Plovers at Betka, and today we were lucky to see 4.  Here are two of them.

There was very little in flower through the walk, other than the banksias on the dunes (well populated with Little Wattlebirds) ...

... and a few Acacias on the edge of the heath.  I thought I'd try out the macro feature on my camera, and reckon it passed well.

When we got back to the house I continued to use the macro to capture a few of the flowers in the garden.  Although the lawn hasn't grown hardly at all since our last visit (lack of rain will do that) the rest of the garden was holding up well.  A recently planted Grevillea.

Another Grevillea, somewhat more established.

A candlestick Banksia: the full inflorescence is about 30cm long!

No idea what this flower isbut I thought it quite pretty,

In the afternoon we headed off to the excellent, and birder friendly, Water Treatment Works to add some ducks to the trip list.  They were there in good numbers but my first image is of a Wedge-tailed Eagle overlooking the ponds.  Although it looks very dark there was quite a bit of white under the wings so my guess is that it isn't quite fully adult yet.

Here are some of the ducks. Most of them are Pacific Black Ducks (112 in total) but there are a few of the 45 Australasian Shovelers and 1 Hardhead (35).  For some reason I didn't take a photo of the 85 Pink-eared Ducks!  In total I recorded 31 species here.

As it was still only mid afternoon we swung by Bastion Point again to look at the waders and enjoy walking a long the firm sand at low tide.  It seemed unusual to find a flock of ~25 Galahs feeding on the dunes.

I didn't have the phone adapter for my telescope with me so didn't get any images of the more distant waders.  The highlight there was the number of small plovers (37 Red-capped Plovers and 4 Double-barred Plovers).  Frances has abandoned the Plover-Dotterel daftness and will henceforth call them all Plovdotts!

A full moon was due tonight and was watched for eagerly, expecting it to rise where the sun did (see red arrow above).  Instead it came up at the purple arrow and we missed the actual rise.This gives the idea.  (Hint to self: try using the night scene mode on the camera!)
In case you are wondering the dark splodges in the next image are not crud on my lens but the fruitbats flying out.  There arestill very good numbers heading off, but they're starting later relative to darkness.

A wider angle.

After all this excitement Frances heard a noise in the bushes and expcted it to be the Koalas.  Instead it was Brush-tailed Possum.  A good chance to try out the flash on my camera.  The first trick was to work out how to open the flash.  The manual revealed that!

Then the camera seemed disinclined to work.  The word 'low' appeared in the viewfinder and eventually I was able to find this meant "low light" which would delay the focus setting.  After a little experimenting I discovered that the actual problem was not low light but "no light".  The lens cap was still on!  By the time I'd removed that, the possum was long gone.  Wot a Muppet!

I didn't want to waste my research so went to photograph the koalas (we had observed that there were 2 of them close together before darkness fell).  Bingo.  The flash works well - especially as the marsupials (second one bottom left corner) were about 10m away.

By the end of the 30th we were up to  88 species of birds for the trip: the poo pits always add several species!