Trees in a wide black land

The grass is growing back again but much of the area - home of the protruding greywacke rock - is still pretty black.  Before getting to photos of trees and such like here are a couple of snaps of deranged person who has been doing pruning of dark shrubs.  The clothing is staying in a special spot and getting reworn - I think that when it gets washed it'll score a private immersion.  First front view ...
 .. and then the back to emphasise the colour of my arms!
The width of the black land is shown in this image put up  by the RFS at a Community Gathering.  The red dot is our house.
The next image shows the extent of the burn at various times.  The distance from point 1  to point 2 is about 2kms: the fire took 9 minutes to cover that - considerably less than I would take to run up that hill.  The fire would have been close to point 2 as I left.  Our house is at point 3 which I think the fire would have reached about 40 minutes later- burning downhill more slowly.
Leaving the history, on 9 March I wandered up to the top paddock to see how things are going.  In terms of the ground shoots of grass are poking up which will give some natural food for kangaroos.  (They have eaten some of the supplementary hay but there is still a bit there.)   I shall have to do some research into which trees are still green and which have browned off, but will repeat an image from the last post to highlight the contrast.  The skyline is effectively point 2 in the second map.
This tree - I think a Yellow Box (Eucalyptus meliodora) is definitely looking a tad singed but it is still vertical.
 Looking at the base of the stump I suspect that is a temporary situation, which will change when we get a strong Northerly wind (or if the canopy recovers and the light dry foliage is replaced by heavy green leaves).
Back in the wooded area this tree snapped off about 10m up.  I suspect there is some firewood in there but need to check carefully what is bearing weight before 'harvesting'.
Back at the house in the late afternoon, the light brown leaves contrasted with the clear blue sky.
 So did the trunk of this E. meliodora in the sun room bed photographed with the frame of the windows in front of it.
The moon also rose behind our great big tree.  Its a naff image of both moon and tree but I like the overall spooky effect !



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