The House(s) of Fran_mart

25 members and guests gathered in Buxton St Deakin for a prowl around the NW section of this element of Canberra Nature Park .  Thanks to Ian and Lindell for leading. It was already warm, and the developing wind over the mountains was breaking the clouds into interesting patterns. I was regretting not moving to an 8:30 start.  The first third of the walk was uphill, to a lesser or greater extent, through bush with not a great deal of understorey. There was not a great diversity of birds either: while a number of birds were evident they were nearly all Noisy Miners! A  pleasing   exception was a Speckled Warbler seen by several members. Where the walk went parallel to the Golf Course (only one Raven-sown golf ball was found) the understorey became more evident; ... the number of noisy Miners decreased and the diversity of birds picked up. Particularly good sightings along this stretch included a Common Bronzewing feeding a fledgling and a pair of...

( It is probably inappropriate to say anything good about Rolf Harris or his work these days, bur I thought his song with a similar (de-parenthesised) title was hilarious.  One original verse does need a bit of work, but "Let the traditional owners go loose, Bruce" doesn't scan well.  This seems to have been overcome in one set of lyrics and in fact the official version, by deleting the verse. ) We have just returned from a flying visit to Kangaroo Valley in the Shoalhaven area.  The impetus to this was to: check out elements of the Tulip Festival at Bowral; and meet up with some ANPS friends and check out their camper-trailers. The interest started at the end of Briars Sharrow Rd where we found a group of cars, one of which had a sign saying "Walkers Ahead".  I wondered if this was a sponsored walk by Liam Haven -a soldier blinded by an IED in Iraq - from Sydney to Canberra.  If so they were taking an unusual route from Bungendore to Sydney! I decid...