To the West.
Dec 23rd, 2009 by Duncan
Hello everyone, I have to report that the news on my knee is not good, which means my ability to get out and about, and incidentally the future of the blog is very uncertain. Consequently I will be posting some extracts from our 1990 trip to Western Australia to keep the ball rolling until the picture becomes a bit clearer. All the pictures are scanned from Kodachrome slides, and some like the Varied Sittella are greatly enlarged. I hope they will be of interest.
I’ll also take this opportunity to wish everyone a Happy Christmas, and hope that the New Year is all that you could wish for.
In the previous post I mentioned our trip to Western Australia. It happened in the spring, and of course the main focus by far was on the mind boggling flora display, and the hundreds of colour slides that came from that trip reflected our preoccupation with things botanical. However we weren’t blind to things avian, and at Eyre Bird Observatory we had a lot of fun watching the evening performances of the Major Mitchell Cockatoos when they came in for a drink from the water bowl.
The outstanding feature for us from a botanical point of view was seeing in their native habitat plants and trees that we had long admired and in some instances tried to grow. The 700K run from Eyre to Esperance was a long, long day due to the fact that we stopped and reversed so many times to look, photograph, and sometimes touch, as in the case of the Gimlet Gums. Who could resist running their hands along the smooth spirally twisted trunks.
And then when we were crossing the Fraser Range, making jokes about how we should find something good in a place named after us, we found a beautiful fan flower, Scaevola oxyclona. What a striking plant, a mounded plant of about a metre spread covered with flowers.
One of our first bird ticks came from a little patch of bush at Esperance. Banksias were in flower and male and female Western Spinebills were flitting everwhere. I photographed the banksias of course, but the spinebills were far too quick. The Stirling Ranges gave us quite a few more lifers, including Brown Honeyeater, Square-tailed Kite, Western Rosella, Red-capped Parrot, Rufous Treecreeper, White-tailed Black Cockatoo species, and the western race of the White-naped Honeyeater with the white eye crescent. We also had our first look at the wonderfully camouflaged nest of the Varied Sittella, cunningly situated in a fork and virtually impossible to spot without seeing one of the parents flying to it.
The weather at the Stirlings was overcast and wet, so we cut our stay short and headed for Albany which will be the subject of the next post. Click the Scaevola picture to enlarge.