Nature in Carwoola: less bad and less-less bad

Years ago we followed the detective stories written by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo in which the realists in the Stockholm Police never rated anything as good.  Their ultimate accolade was "less bad".  We will get to the duplicatory situation at the end of the post but be warned, like most detective stories death is involved in this post, so if you are sensitive don't go past the beetle image..

With the day being hot I decided about noon to take the small beast for a Thelymitra hunt in a known area on Whiskers Creek Rd.  We got lucky and found about 10 flowering plants of T. pauciflora.

This inspired me to go and check a few known haunts of the species on our property and sure enough there they were.  Only three plants found but that is better than the big fat zero I had previously got for this year.

The patch of Diuris pardina near our most productive orchid patch was a bit thinner than in recent years but they are coming up now.
 D. sulphurea are really hitting their straps all over the property.

I lifted a rain-water butt this morning and there was a nice little frog - I suspect from the shape of the ridges -  Crinia signifera resting under it.
While taking the small dog for her major walk earlier this morning we saw two Red-necked Wallabies, which are quite unusual on the property.  This image doesn't show the redness too well but the overall shape of the animal, and the way it moved, were quite different from the Eastern Grey Kangaroos.  The gait was much more like the hunched over 'bounding' of a Swampie.
 On looking under a rock I found this small beetle sheltering from the heat.  Naming will occur later.
As we came back past the house I noticed a small grey lump on the ground.  Giving it a little attention it was obviously a Tawny Frogmouth chick. 'Was' is definitely the correct tense: ants were already doing what ants do.
 On reading HANZAB I found that it is quite common for chicks to fall out of the nest and I suspect that is what has happened here with the poor thing flapping a few metres to where I found it.  Clearly the event happened overnight so predation by an owl was a possibility but the usual suspects for predating Frogmouth nests are apparently Ravens and Currawongs, neither of which are nocturnal..

Checking the nest there is still at least one chick in there.

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