The House(s) of Fran_mart

At times I feel that the Bush Capital has been completely done away with, by the efforts of the development lobby and the habitat reduction burners.  And then I visit a couple of sites  - admittedly both constructed rather than natural - and feel a little more "glass half-full". The first locale was the Australian National Botanic Gardens (ANBG).  It was a lovely Spring day (24.7 o C) with light cloud beginning to roll in in front of a change. As we set off a large bus arrived with kids on a trip from Broome.  (I asked a teacher, and they had flown down, not come in the bus.)  While their warm-up jackets were about the loudest I have seen, the kids were much quieter than the usual rioting horde in ANBG.  A family of Australian Wood Ducks were feeding in front of the cafe.  These art works were part of a competition in which kids made art works on threatened species. It was organised by the Humane Society International who seem to have a...

While I normally consider myself somewhere on the Left I reckon the following photos are of things that are just about correct - or Right!  Some have already contributed to Mr Zuckerbergs Empire but I thought the shareholders of Google also deserved a suck of the sauce bottle so here we go.  The first few photographs are from ANBG and were taken on 13 September. This was the first Gippsland Water Dragon I had seen this year.  It was in a shady area just below the caff at the gardens.  This one was lurking in some shade above the waterfall in the rock garden. These next two were basking in full sun on rocks beside the water at the bottom of the waterfall. I was impressed with how much more melanin they were showing. Nearby were some Gymea Lilies about to show Black Mountain Tower who is boss.  New York and Tolkien may have two towers, but Canberra has 4! We now return to beautiful downtown Carwoola, on the 14th of September.  I'll begin wi...

The organiser of the Plant Science Group within the Friends of the Australian National Botanic Garden (Anne Campbell)arranged for the Group to visit the National Insect Collection maintained by CSIRO at their Black Mountain facility.  We were to be shown around by Ted Edwards and Marianne Horak, both of whom are retired lepidopterists at the Collection.  (They have retired from the payroll at CSIRO, not from study of moths!) I'll start with a huge thank-you to all three of them for an extraordinarily interesting visit.  I hope I can remember enough of what we were told and shown to make sense in what follows! We began with some big and pretty insects,  The blue ones and the green ones are the same species (with the females a brown colour).  This fits their lifestyles with the males living above the rainforest canopy and the females lurking below.If I have it correctly these are coloured by pigmentation.  The third case has moths with orange colours: thi...