Several natural history topics

Our dog walk this morning was very pleasant, although the Southerly was a little brisk when walking in to it.  It was very dry, giving a good display of condensation trails as punters flew from Sydney to Melbourne.
Getting back towards the house I happened to glance down and was surprised to see a reasonable supply of guano.
Looking up up, my ghast was flabbered to see Ms Tawny Frogmouth in a very scrawny tree.
There have been many days this year when I haven't been able to find them and judging by the amount of poop she and/or her mate have been sitting here.  I know it was the female as himself had, for the first time this season, assumed the position on the nest brooding the eggs.  This was exactly the date estimated by adding the average length of nest building to the date they started the process.
While going to take these photos one of the pair of Grey Currawongs that are currently resident posed nicely.  I suspect they are nesting somewhere nearby but I have not, so far been able to work out where.
There are still a lot of daffodils in flower of a range of shapes, colours and sizes.





To prove we are not into colourism we also have a few tulips in pots!
In recent times our concrete ford is frequently decorated with objects like this.  Although we rarely see Brush-tailed Possums around the house they are evidently alive, and with well-functioning bowels down at the Creek.  (I have just realised that there is an unusually shitty focus in this post:  sorry about that.)
Possibly what the possums are eating are these willow catkins.
The Acacias are still doing very well.  This A. mearnsii is very attractive in the direct seeded area.
Hear is a close up of some blossom and foliage.

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