A short walk round the block

On the afternoon of 4 March I thought I would go for a prowl around parts of the block where orchids had been rampant during Spring, in the hope that Autumn orchids would also be there.  To some extent that was true in that in some areas one could barely plant a foot between the Parson's Bands Eriochilus cuculata.  Some of them were even in clumps.

I couldn't find any Midge orchids, although I did find some last year.  The season is not yet over!

I also kept an eye open for interesting arthropods.  My first target was a weevil, but it seemed t be another example of the dodgy insect family, in that it kept hiding on the opposite side of a twig to my camera: perhaps in has got some Treecreeper DNA?  A big green dragonfly was more obliging.

On getting to the middle dam a smaller red dragonfly was also obliging.  The image is pretty shaky but the insect was some metres away and I was concerned about myself joining the tadpoles if I tried to get closer.

Butterflies are still present in large numbers, mainly Common Browns with an occasional Australia Painted Lady but they were not in a torpid mood during this patrol.  There continue to be a number of Salt and Pepper moths around but they were also very active.  A small brown moth was welded firmly to a gum leaf (Googling those terms was of no help in identifying the beast).

On our morning walks recently one of the issues has been the number of spider webs that we walk into.  As I am usually in front, being in charge of the small dog, I have usually copped the brunt of these.  Being later in the day there were not so many and I was able to dodge them.  Here are a couple of snaps of the constructors (I was going to say 'occupants' but most of occupants were not photographed as nearly-dead things are not interesting).

Although we are now 5 days into Autumn there was still quite a lot of flowers around, especially Wahlenbergias (Australian bluebells).  Interestingly some of the eucalypts seem to be coming into flower: I think this was Yellow Box (Eucalyptus meliodora) and might offer some interesting insect images in the next few days,