Kowen Aussie, Kowen

I apologise to anyone distressed, in the current parlous situation, by the obscure link to a cricket chant!

The ANPS group went to the Kowen Escarpment overlooking Sutton Road on 30 March.   In case anyone wonders what an escarpment means wikipedia deals with the definition rather well.  Steep and rocky as predicted.

Despite it being well into Autumn (Fall, for any North Americans reading this) there were a good range of flowers around.  Here are a Helichrysum, a Brachyscome (both very common) red Astroloma and a blue Derwentia (I only saw one cluster of flowers of each of these).


I should note that the Astroloma flower is about 5mm across!  (Drawing an analogy to orchids it is closer to Microtis than Cymbidium!)

We also found 2 nice colonies of Diplodium truncatum, the Little Dumpy.  Here are three images from various perspectives.


The only fungus I noted was this bracket fungus.  I haven't yet been able to identify it.
The invertebrates were interesting (as usual).  I have really only started looking at them closely this year, and only in this week did I first notice that the rolled up leaves in spider webs had a spider living inside them.  They seem to be members of the family Araneidae.   We thought it looked a bit like a hermit crab and there appears to be one record of them using a snail shell as a retreat!
The flowers were getting visited by insects of one sort or another and  got this snap of a bee doing the business on a Leucochrysum.
 Lunch was spent beside a series of pools in a rocky outcrop on a creek.  Frances spotted some yabbies (crustaceans) gobbling scraps in the bottom of the pool, but I couldn't persuade my camera to penetrate 20cm of water to get an image.  A water strider (family Gerridae) assaulted (with extreme prejudice) a moth which had landed on the water surface.
I particularly like the visibility of the meniscus acting on the strider's feet!

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