The House(s) of Fran_mart

This afternoon we did one of our regular walks along the Betka River, to the clifftops to Point Difficult and back to Betka Beach.  Much of interest. The stretch along the River was notable for the continuing array of orchids in the (DNA-regulated) genus Pterostylis.  We found 4 species today P. grandiflora - pretty much finished; P. tunstallii , also used; P. nutans - still good numbers and some emerging; and  P. concinna - still good numbers visible. We looked out from Point Difficult and saw no cetaceans nor pelagic birds but a White-bellied Sea Eagle was good compensation.  One of our bogies in this area in trying to identify this plant.  A search of Flora of Victoria suggests Lasiopetallum macrophyllum .  I have put these images on iNaturalist to see what they think.  A little further along we found that the P. melagramma had finally started to open its buds.  A tiny spider making a web in an unknown inflorescen...

I had been planning to try to drive to Dowell Creek today but I got unenthusiastic about driving to and from Genoa for the fourth time in 7 days!  Frances had recently  suggested that we do the walk from Bucklands to Captains Creek Jetty so we decided that was a go for today. This report will be thematically organised again beginning with general stuff about the outing, followed by fungi, flowers and ferns, birds and animals.  This grab from eBird shows the route. I had previously done the first 2km and advised Frances it was rocky, but flat.  That lasts for about another 1km until we got to Captain Creek.  Then the track became less rocky but headed uphill.  From looking at my topo map the several uphills and downhills were about 4 contour lines each.  So it was a reasonable workout.  By the time we got back to the car I was more like Captain Creak! The Parks people had cleared a couple of large fallen trees off the track but this one had ...

In a recent Facebook exchange it was agreed that too many photos of echidnas, pelicans and a couple of other things were impossible.  Several of them feature in this post (although not echidna - I saw one yesterday, but the phone-photo went to Echidna CSI from whence it is not really shareable). This post covers two days, as I didn't take many photos on Tuesday 11/12.  Dawn looked promising but didn't develop strong colours. I was up on the roof making sure the gutters were clear and had an eyeball with this young person in the adjacent gum tree.  Definitely a species of which too many photos are never enough. We did the Casuarina walk today and everywhere was very dry.  Hardly any ground layer flowers and only Leptospermum sp in the shrubs. There were many fallen florets of   Dendrophthoe vitellina  on the ground.  I had never noticed this mistletoe until last Saturday (see also below). We found no open orchids but the Dipodium pu...