The House(s) of Fran_mart

A group of friends from the ANPS ACT visited Mallacoota over the weekend to plan for a full-on field trip in August this year.  The weather yesterday was ungood, and there was a power failure last night: welcome to East Gippsland! The weather today was a little better in that it wasn't raining but the wind was gusting up to 40kph (at home - it has been much higher than that at Gabo Island).  However we trotted out to Shipwreck Creek to do a loop track there (which I had seen on a map but not walked all of). Here is a map of where we went, courtesy of eBird.  The walk is essentially in three parts as indicated, As we descended to the beach some quite attractive fungi were growing on a tree trunk.  I suspect the tree is beyond "unwell".  The best fit to photos in " Tasmanian Fungi " is to Antrodiella zonata but I didn't take the undersurface! I had been worried that the creek across the beach might be high but there was a nice sand ridge blocking it....

We brought one of our bird baths down from Carwoola and initially placed it amongst some pelargoniums.  The birds ignored it completely.  We moved it towards a Camellia bush and it now gets quite a bit of action:  I haven't recorded the visitors in a rigorous fashion but guess about 6 species so far have actually used it. To start the narrative, here is the Camellia bush. This bush is very popular with New Holland Honeyeaters: This leads them to the bath.  I haven't seen a Common Bronzewing on the bath, but when one displays its bronze wing so nicely it has to be photographed.  Around noon I went for a walk around the Double Creek Nature Trail, about 5km along Genoa Rd.  A visiting friend had tried this a couple of weeks ago and it was flooded/  It isn't flooded now the Inlet has been drained!  (Incidentally my camera's effort at this was rather underexposed, so I have edited the shot with Photoshop Express: a free program from A...

Eden is the closest medium sized town to Mallacoota and one of the few places not to feature in the Hope and Crosby "Road" series.  I had to go there to get some work done on Frances' car and allowed 75 minutes for the voyage (it usually takes about 50 minutes). Setting off along Genoa Rd it seemed that I might have underestimated as I had to follow someone with a caravam.  Judging by the way they were taking more than their share of the road, and still going very slowly, I assumed they were doing their first trip with a van.  I got past them at Gypsy Point Cemetery, but met two more vans before getting to Genoa. They both turned North, but a climbing lane soon disposed of them.  Then a 3km road works limit - for 50m of work!  Grrr.  This only delayed me by a bit until I caught up with two more caravans (there were lots coming towards me also).  I took several kms to get past them but I did. Then I saw the worst hoarding in Australia - and I plac...

The day opened with the closing of the moon; I thought there could be quite a good sunrise this morning, but if there was it was not evident on the occasions I checked it.  However when the fog closed in it was quite attractive.  Later in the day I went for a ride from home to Bucklands to the wharf and home again.  My main aim was to get some photos of the various areas that are damp, despite the opening of the Inlet.  I started taking photos at the entrance to the Park at Bucklands.  The sign is correct!  There wasn't a sign announcing closure of the bike path - and the one in the background prohibiting camping is probably a tad redundant. There had been some comments on a Facebook group about the difficulty of launching boats at the current water levels.  Quite a few folk had obviously worked out how to do this at Karbeethong, in some cases without a 4x4!  It would probably help to have prior knowledge of exactly where the ram...