Its gunna be hotter ..

On a Summer trip to Batlow everywhere we went we heard "Its gunna be hotter in Wagga."   We hope its gunna be hotter in Mallacoota than Carwoola.  At present it seems to be: its 4oC outside now at 'coota and the BoM is offering -4oC at Canberra Airport.  A member of the Carwoola Facebook Group - whose property overlooks the Plain - posted that it got down to -4.8oC.   (Weather Underground has a couple of sites in Carwoola showing +1.8oC and -1oC at about 0630, reflecting different positions on hillsides!)

Mallacoota got a mention on the ABC TV News on the evening of the 22nd as getting to 16oC which was the warmest on the coast.  It was certainly a very pleasant day with - very unusually - no wind later in the day.  The sky was very clear as the sun rose.
That photo is interesting as the peak colour is not in fact where the sun rises, which is right on the LH edge of the image.  I must give some thought to that.

As we set off on the dog walk, with small dog right in the lead, Frances noticed a furry lump in one of the eucalypts halfway down the mountain that is Karbeethong avenue.
After a night of munching eucalypt leaves it must be very nice to curl up in the sunrise and snooze the day away. 
 Apart from a slight adjustment of the angle the same position was maintained all day.  This contrasts with occupation of the trees next to the house where they seem to shift around quite a bit during the day.

The bird highlight of the walk was a Restless Flycatcher at the point where Lakeside Drive gets to the houses that front the road.

Our second walk of the day was to Tip Beach.  The first lot of excitement was 17 Australian Gannets fishing a hundred or so metres offshore.  As we walked on, another 16 flew in to join them, and I saw a further 10 around the corner.  A very good crop of the species.
We went to this beach a Frances wished to investigate the shells washed up there and the rock pools.  A highlight of the pools was the sea anemones.  I suspect it is just serendipity that this one is covered in broken bits of shell.
 It is certainly luck that this one caught a reflection of the photographer.
A sample of the pile of shells on the corner of Bastion Point.
 Here is a typically crowded beach, looking towards Bastion Point. 
 Looking out to sea I spotted 6 Pacific Gulls sitting on the water a few hundred metres of shore.  These were the first I have seen at Mallacoota.  Later in the afternoon we went to Captain Stevenson's Lookout and 2 juvenile PGs flew past: they looked huge and initially stirred thoughts of raptor.  Here is one perched in the middle of the Inlet.
Interestingly there wasn't a Pied Oystercatcher in the Inlet.  As a member of the Mallacoota Birds Facebook Group observed 13 of them at Quarry Beach perhaps the gang that are usually in the Inlet have moved West for a while?  That could be explained by the water level in the Inlet being higher than usual - the mouth is still closed.

There were a lot (~40) of kangaroos in the caravan park.  This big old man seemed a bit disinclined to move on, despite getting some clear advice from Tammy.
 

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