ANPS goes up the River (without a paddle)

Today we gathered at Casuarina Sands for a walk along the track upstream towards Kambah Pool.  As it was 13km one way we didn't intend to do the whole trek.  Perhaps it would have been easier to do it by canoe: looks nice and smooth at the Cotter Bridge.
 The water coming out of the Cotter River into the Murrumbidgee looks a little less smooth.
 About 1km upstream, and it definitely looks as though coming downstream would be better,  (I was anxiously looking around to make sure there were no banjo players at this point.)
 A little more turbulence in a context of Acacia rubida.
 The A. rubida ascended to the rocks behind us  ...
 ... and to the skies around us.
 The first plant to be covered in close-up is Bertya rosmarinifolia.  This shows sexual dimorphism (that phrase should boost my hit counts a bit) and we have ladies first.
 Here are the blokes.
 We then entered heath city.
Cryptandra propinqua!
 Cryptandra amara var longiflora
 Leucopogon attenuatus
 Nearly all the Correa plants had dried up ex-flowers.  Even though it isn't a great image I felt this C. reflexa deserved some publicity for maintaining colour and life.
There was much excitement about finding several specimens of Brachyscome willisii (known as the Royalla daisy).  This is rather rare so GPS readings were taken (on two receivers, and they gave the same answer - the most amazing event of the day).
 Clematis microphylla is also "boys and girls".  However I could only find boys!
 Rhodanthe anthemoides
 This bracket fungus, growing on a burnt out Casuarina made a pleasant shape.
 I tried hard toget a photo of a very lurid male Flame Robin but it was camera shy.  These Australian Wood Ducks also tried to escape but a 24X zoom defeated them!
 Frances found me a leaf beetle but by this time the wind has arisen and the jerking around of the leaf caused it to fall off the leaf before the shutter clicked.  A second specimen was more determined to stay in position.  You can see its feet clearly holding on!
 In the distance we could hear and see the work progressing on the new Cotter dam,  First one crane, with the dam wall just poking above the tree top.
 Then three cranes, looking rather like the Martians in War of the Worlds!

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

Satin Bowerbird gets ready for Lanigans Ball.

Image
Having some time to spare today I went to check the bower near "Tom Green's Seat" in the Australian National Botanic Gardens.  The bower was well occupied by what I take to be - based on the green plumage and yellow bill - a 5th or 6th year male Satin Bowerbird.  (With all these images, click on them for a bigger - unfortunately not better focused picture.  The shots were taken hand held on full zoom from about 10m distance into a fairly well shaded location.) He was very much engaged in adding to the construction. Then it seemed that another bird called from the bush above.  This led to a whole lot of activity: the most spectacular (and worst imaged) was a flash of the wings: The bird also did a fair bit of hopping around.  Given that it was still immature I called to mind the greatest traditional Irish song of all time: Diarmuid O'Leary and the Bards performing Lanigan's Ball .  This ditty refers to spending "6 long months at Brooks Academy learning
Read more