More nature around Carwoola and Primrose Valley

Sorry I have been a bit slow in updating this with text Been a bit busy with real estate stuff recently.

On 20 November I went for a drive round the area which is the focus of this post but it begins with a few things from home.

I was surprised to see the Frogmouths nest empty!
 The chicks haven't flown but have just crawled a metre or so away and perched on a branch with Dad in attendance.
This isn't that unusual but they were still there on the morning of the 21st.  That is unusual, as they usually go back to the nest before dark.  The next day they had moved further away to such a position they must have flown: this is the shortest brooding period I have recorded.

There has been an outbreak of unwellness amongst some wildlife,  A beetle - still with a nice purple iridescence on the elytra.
This spider was actually still alive when I chucked it outside.  Only then did I notice the white tip to the abdomen, which made me glad I hadn't picked it up in my hand, but in a wad of paper.  Their bites can be painful and nasty in after effects.
We found this snake skeleton (with a little meat still attached) on our drive.  I flicked it off to one side and when I came back later ...
.. it was very well endowed with ants
The road I ended up on was at the low end of Yanununbeyan SCA.  It seemed that someone had tried  to repair the road but was unfamiliar with the use of a roller to compact the surface,  Rather loose and bumpy.
Steepness has always been available in here!
There was a fair amount of flowering visible.  Brachyloma daphnoides
Comesperma volubile

A couple of beans.

Kunzea parvifolia.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 rec...
Read more

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 ...
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 bird...
Read more