Hanrahan the hero of East Gippsland.

The gentleman referred to in the title is a farmer, remembered for never being happy with the current weather.

The day dawned with cloud.  However I was aware that we were in Mexico (ie South of the Border) and knew that we still had to least 3 seasons  to fit in to the rest of the day.  One of them at least should be pleasant!

 Indeed, so it turned out later in the day, as shown in this postcard shot.
 What the postcard doesn't show is the strong Westerly wind.  That did have the side benefit of creating unusual patterns on the beach in the lee of shells and small stones.

Although not in NSW I couldn't resist this snap of the Mallacoota War Memorial.  Its a pity that the central plaque refers to Bruce Ruxton - one of my least favourite people.
Getting back into the chronology, the improvement depicted above hadn’t happened by the time we took Tammie for a walk up the Bowerbird infested road.  That meant we beat a retreat as the sky was spitting at us.  I suspect that there is a PhD in linguistics to be obtained for listing all the language Victorians have for wet weather. 

By the time we got home the weather had improved from “spitting” to “threatening to spit” so we took ourselves off to the Shipwreck Creek track to find some flowers and/or birds.   At first this seemed a rather desperate endeavour, especially since just as we started to find some blossom the weather (which had gone sideways  to “ominous”) got worse, achieving ‘light shower’ status. Of course when we got back to the car spitting status had been re-attained so we set off to see what could be seen.  The initial answer was “not much beyond bracken and eucalypts”.   However we then got a technique of stopping for a snuffle as soon as we saw some flowers - mainly where the bracken was not growing right out to the road - and found a lot of interesting things.  

 We went for a walk along a track outside the airport fence.  I was a bit perplexed why Tammie suddenly yelped and moved back on the track as she is not a dog who yelps much.  Then I realised that she had just learnt about electric fences as wombat deterrents!

Enough of this text let us get into the pictures of flowers that I think we can identify.  (Those which I cannot take a guess at have their own page: in either case suggestions for names are welcomed.)  Note that where 'sp.' appears I am not completely confident of the species and those with sp and no species name mean I have settled happily at the genus level!

Dampiera sp.
 Billardiera scandens
 Goodenia sp. ovata
 Viminaria juncea (one of the very few beans we saw flowering).
Senecio linearifolius.  The common name of this species refers to 'groundsel' which I recall as a very short and prolific weed in English gardens of my childhood.
 Olearia sp
 Melaleuca sp. ericifolia
 Dianella sp.
 Kunzea ericoides
 Lobelia sp
 Pimelia sp
Patersonia sp
 Euphorbia paralias  It was growing in a littoral sand dune so the vernacular name of "sea spurge" is appropriate.
After lunch the weather improved from a hailstorm (having visited “sounds like thunder nearby” en route) to “strong wind before rain” although our wearing of raincoats deferred the rain!  WE went for a stroll around Bastion Point where we saw the last species.  

Birds were few and far between on the beach.  Although we added 6 species to the trip list they were all birds in 1s and 2s.  Perhaps the gale had driven them off?

Little Wattlebirds were common visitors to the house.

 So were Satin Bowerbirds.  From the colour of the throat I think this is a female.
 A Silver Gull came to visit the railing.
 I think the camera did a fair job of focusing to enable this clip of the eye!
The possum situation of the previous evening/night re-emerged and is described in its own post.

Here are links to other parts of this saga:

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