Mallacootie September 2014 (pt 3)

The day began.
This is one of the default 'moods' of the Inlet: calm with the sun rising through light cloud.  Later in the day a breeze arose causing strange wave patterns, but alas I didn't get a photo of that.

Walking into the town in the morning a group of Royal Spoonbills were nicely reflected in the water of a side lagoon.
 So was a nearby Great Egret.
 I have included this image to show the relative sizes of a White-faced Heron and a Great Egret.
 When seen alone I think of the Heron as quite a large bird but clearly it's relatively small.  Why is the next bird called a Whistling Kite?
Because it whistles!  I am not sure who it was calling to: another bird (possibly its mate?) was lower down in this tree, or a third bird about 100m away.
In the afternoon we went for a walk along the Casuarina Trail to the West of the town.  Should any trail bike riders infest the track this would improve their attitude.  (We had some evidence that mountain bikers could could negotiate the obstacle.)
 I will have to look this fungus up when we get home.
 We'll now move into plant photos, ending up with some more orchids.  I begin with Leucopogon lanceolatus, common on the sandy heath.
In the bush this looked like yet another Acacia sp.  However looking at the image I wonder if it isn't some form of Callistemon.
 Comespermum volubile.
 A lily!  Pass - although it is very pretty.
In addition to those featured the Casuarina trail had a good collection of Myrbelia, Correa and Tetratheca, shown over the previous two days.

We ended up with 6 species of orchid along the track.  This first had no associated rosette of leaves leading me to the genus Diplodium rather than Pterostylis.  I believe it is D, grandiflorum, the Cobra Greenhood.   (Apart from anything else most other Diplodiums are Autumn or Winter flowering.)
 Petalochilus fuscata.
 We ended up finding quite a few Rustyhoods,  The amount, and shade, of 'rust' varied quite a bit, but it seems that there is only one candidate in this area- Pterostylis pedunculata.  But they are pretty so here are three images.



 The only example of Stegostyla clarkii was at the town end of the track.
 I believe this to be Bunochilus longifolius.
 From the brown-ness of the labellum. and the smaller number of leaves I called this B. tunstallii.

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