Ben Cruachan – natural history

On a cold but pleasant winter’s day I met up with Peter to have a look at some new territory he’d found near Lake Glenmaggie. We saw some nice birds including Scarlet Robin, several varieties of Thornbill, White-browed Scrubwrens, Golden Whistler, Spotted Pardalotes, and some brilliantly coloured Striated Pardalotes. I was too busy watching the latter through the bins to think of the camera, and when the penny finally dropped they of course left the low tree and flew up out of range. Above the river there are rocky cliffs, and one overhang had a great concentration of Paper Wasp nests, a different species I think to the two different kinds I photographed on Mount Angus Creek. Those were either suspended by a thread, or fixed flat on the rock, while these were vertical sheets of cells, suspended by their top surfaces.

Another surprise was a wealth of shrubs of Zieria cytisoides, a rock loving pink flowered plant in the Rutaceae, similar in appearance to a boronia. They were in bud too, so a visit later on will be rewarding. Eagle Eye also found lots of orchid leaves, acianthus and possibly cyrtostylis, or Gnat Orchid. One of the latter had a short flowering stem with buds, looks like another trip there in a week or three.
I’d told Peter about a huge Forest Red Gum in the district, and after we finished with the birds and orchids we went on down into the dairying country where it is on the roadside reserve. You could drive past this tree and note that it’s big, but if you pull up and walk around it the sheer bulk of this ancient tree really hits you. Unfortunately a photo can never give a true picture of the size of something like this, but anyway….

There was a contented herd of milkers in the adjacent paddock, attended by a flock of Cattle Egrets. The Northern Territory was colonised by this species as recently as the 1940s, part of a world-wide expansion. From there they spread, and are now common in Gippsland. They migrate north to breed, and are quite a spectacular sight in their orange breeding plumage.

Some years ago there was a flock of about one hundred with cows on a farm just out of the town, and after going home for the camera, Coral and I returned to take some photos. When we returned they were nowhere to be seen, but after scanning through the bins we found them. They were waiting patiently beside the dairy away up on the hill, while the afternoon milking was in progress. Funny birds. Click the last two pix to enlarge.