On going natural history of Carwoola

I will start by admitting that I am possibly stretching the definitions of both 'natural' and 'Carwoola', but its my blog!

The starting point is to repeat a photo from my Facebook page, under the spiffy image rule.  This shows 3/4 of the Tawny Frogmouth family.  Mum rarely visits the nest in daylight and I couldn't find her at all today.
Having a little time to spare I went to visit the community land at Molonglo River Park  It was good to see that someone has been planting new shrubs there.  On getting to the billabong it was good to see an Australasian Grebe in full breeding plumage, and a nice reflection.
 A male Australian Wood Duck (and snakey friend)
A female Australian Wood Duck (and snakey friend)
 The Wood Ducks get their act together.
 Refraction got in the way somewhat in this image, but hopefully you'll be able to see a rather large - at least 60cm long - European Carp swimming by.  Judging by the splashing sounds they are breeding there!
Another introduced pest is the Hawthorn.  They do have pretty flowers and the birds like the fruit in Winter but it is a pest
 Over the early afternoon there were many calls of Woodswallows over the house.  Many of them were too high to ID to species level but of those I could see they were all Masked or Dusky - no White-browed.  So we decided to go and see if we could find a big flock on the Plain.  On the way out we saw a 1.5m Eastern Brown Snake crossing Whiskers Creek Rd but didn't get a photo.  We did stop to admire the water lilies on a dam in Widgiewa Rd, and then noticed the bank of Dutch Irises behind them.
On the Plain the story was much the same.  Calls of Woodswallows all over, but most were quite high and/or fast moving so no ID to species  We called in at the Fairy Martin culvert but no birds were seen or heard.   At another spot I did hear my first Rufous Songlark of the season.

Just as we got home a Gippsland Water Dragon paused beside the Creek to display his largeness- probably about 60cm.
Later in the day an Eastern Spinebill came to sample the flowers on a succulent on the deck.

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