A triple header

I have had the cold from Hell so have not been very active for the past few days and thus not much to report.  It is getting a bit better - in time for the drive home - and we did get to see a few flowers today.  Here is some stuff from the last three days.

This photo really belongs to the previous post, but I hadn't got it off my phone then.  The phone was attached to my telescope, hoping to catch a view of a whale offshore.  Sort of where the x is.
 I saw a lot of splashes such as might be made by tail slapping, one glimpse of a dorsal fin and the dorsum to which it was attached, and about three spouts.  So there were unphotographed whales out there!

We next went to check out the heath under the powerlines, expecting there to be at least a good crop of Epacris impressa there. 
Oops.  At least they have done it before things flower and particularly before the sun orchids come up.

Frances found a few flowers of which this Correa reflexa was the most photogenic.
 The moon was also pretty photogenic as it rose over the Inlet - making up for me missing the eclipse (which I think would have been hidden behind hills anyway).
 The next day we did a very short walk on Betka Beach at the conclusion of which we spoke to this small fisherperson's minder.  The minder reckoned the fish was ".. a pretty good salmon for the first fish the young bloke'd got on a beach."
 Its just to the left of the rod.  This shows it more clearly.  Definitely one for a nice lunch or tea..
 The moon rose again and this time I got it a bit lower

That gets us to today and we went for a stroll from Davis Beach through the heathland.  Not much in flower except for an Acacia sp, and a few Epacris.
 As we got close to the woodland an A. longifolia was well into bud.
 This is a close up of the unspecified Acacia.
 A pink Epacris.  As always the red ones were impossible to photograph.  (I don't know why the military paint 'stealth bombers' black: deep red seems to do an excellent job of confusing optics!)
 The dominant plant here is Casuarina nana and on looking closely there were a lot of flowers lurking within the bushes.
The Hakea was at the other end of the procreative cycle having just exploded the nuts to expel the seed.  Presumably this is the last spasm as the drought bites here.
 Just before dark Frances looked up from the deck and there was chubby person.  I am sure they were't in the trees an hour earlier.
 I was a tad concerned whether the branches would bear its weight, but we haven't heard any crashes so I presume it knew what it was doing.


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