Canberra snaps

We need to be in Canberra for some routine medical tests.  On which topic Doonebury has commented in the past!
It seems that most people are not in Canberra.  This car park is normally full by 0830 and this is the situation late morning.  Others have advised that (a) it is school holidays and (b) 50% of public servants are working from home.
We went out to Jerrabomberra Wetlands and scored a good snap of a pair of Australasian Shovelers.
Cameras have a lot of intelligence.  Mine worked out that I really wanted an in-focus image of cyclone fencing not a Straw-necked Ibis.
That's better.  The aim was to get the 'straws'.
Field guides rarely mention the white vent area as an ID assist for Brown Falcon.
The next day we went to Stoney Creek Nature Reserve at Uriarra, looking for Pied Butcherbirds.  Here is the routewe followed.
I zoomed out the route to show more of the pine forest on the opposite side of the Murrumbidgee,  I mapped this in about 1988 for the ACT Orienteering Championships.  A somewhat fraught process in many ways.  The main feature of the area was a lot of Kunzea and a large gully somewhat south of our route so we called the map Tea-tree Gully.  I have highlighted it in yellow.
I thought the shape looked like a device used to open walnuts and could be rather strenuous to cross.  However my suggestion of Nutcracker Gulch was over-ruled.

Going along the track we came across this wombat catching a few rays.  Its fur wasn't in great nick so I hope the sunshine was fixing up the mange.
There was much evidence of large wombat burrows, including this double-header in the middle of the track.  Without the stick it would be invisible to any service vehicles using the track.
A view of the 'bidgee,
That was a still part of the river.  Where it crossed the reefs the amount of flow was both visible and audible.
A Great Cormorant.
Natural bonsai!
A White-faced Heron.  These birds always look quite large in the distance but when up close is actually modest in size (eg about 1/4 the weight of a bin chook- Australian White Ibis).  
Although we didn't spot a Pied Butcherbird we got quite a reasonable list of species. Right at the end it got a boost when the Magpies and Cockies all went feral,  A Wedge-tailed Eagle cruised by getting close attention.
Back at the ranch the sunset was muted, bu pleasant.

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