Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

July 13, 2015

Posted under

Backyard birds, kayaking, national parks, waterways

Comments

6 Comments

Rest day on the Tour de Hawkesbury

Sky kayaking

Plunging down the switchbacks of Berowra Waters Road with a canoe strapped on top as a weekend dawn breaks is a hair raising experience, for a newbie driver like me anyway. At any moment, heavy breathing MAMILs (Middle Aged Males In Lycra according to our friend Bruce Ashley, author of Bike It! Sydney and Cycling around Canberra) might suddenly loom out of the fog in the middle of the not-quite-two-lane road.

They’ve swooped down through Galston Gorge, across the only bridge, passed swiftly through Arcadian horsey country, and after a moment of quietly gazing out at the marina as they cross the ferry, they’re battling the steep 200 metres ascent up to the ridge. It would seem rather cruel if, after all that effort, my kayak shot off the roof in an emergency stop and impaled them before they got that well-earned coffee.

Scary as this drive is, it’s not quite as nerveracking as coming back from the Hawkesbury up the Old Pacific Highway on a misty morning – a journey that is begging to be made into a terrifying but addictive computer game called something like “Drive of Doom” or “Death Dodgems”.

Peering through the billowing mist round the hairpin bends, you hope you’ll spot the scattered packs of labouring MAMILs in time to slide right, all the while praying that a mob of motorbikes doesn’t choose that moment to come roaring up from behind to wipe themselves out on your rear window. Or that an oncoming vehicle doesn’t take the next tight corner wide and smash into you headlong. The reward if you win a game is obvious: a triumphant stop high above the clouds at “Pie in the Sky“, a place where the lambs lie down with the lions, or at least, the road cyclists eat pies with the bikies.

But not this weekend. Not a single specimen of the MAMIL, keystone species in our local ecosystem, to be seen. What’s going on around here?

Eventually, as I hauled the kayak off the car and wrestled it into the water, I worked it out. The MAMILs have been up all night watching the Tour de France. At two o’clock in the morning they were gripped as Mark “The Manx Missile” Cavendish floated past Andre “The Gorilla” Greipel to claim his first stage win in two years, his twenty sixth stage in the Tour. And they’re still curled up in bed, knees bent under the covers, dreaming they’re Australia’s next Cadell Evans. Middle aged, but still contenders.

Quiet river

Start of the journey

The river was very very quiet too. In February this year, I ventured for the first time into the brackish winding creeks that feed Calabash Bay. It was fish paradise. Despite my complete indifference to fish as a meal, pet or leisure pursuit, the sheer numbers of tiny transparent spratlings leaping from the water and darting between the mangrove roots was eye opening.

Even nearly twenty years ago, just after the high point of algae blooms and floating maritime corpses in Berowra Creek, research into estuary processes discovered twenty nine species of fish up and down the water. Marra Marra Creek, in the lower reaches, with its saltmarshes and long stretch of mangroves, was the richest, but even upstream there were flathead and flounder, gobies and mullet and perchlets, silver biddies and pacific blue eye.

But this weekend, nothing. I went to see the fish and it was out.

Watery abstract

Mangrove edge

Seagrass and mangrove in Calabash Bay

Misty abstract

One azure kingfisher was so weak with hunger it sat exhausted on a waterside twig in full view long enough for me to take a numerous terrible blurry photographs. If I keep going out in these lean times, I may finally get the chance to take a sharp, closeup shot of an emaciated glinting blue bird spiralling slowly downriver on its back.

Despite my glass-half-empty-and-probably-tainted-with-nuclear-fallout tendencies, I’m pretty sure the lack of visible fish is a natural thing, part of the cycle of life. Most of the inhabitants of the creek spawn in spring and summer, so the tiddlers of the summertime shallows are no doubt happily traversing deeper waters now, invisible and unknowable to those who drift involuntarily into unconsciousness at the mere mention of rod, bait or tackle.

Looking back to Berowra Creek from Calabash Bay

Evidence of the existence of boaties

There must have been a few fish around, I guess, along with the amphipods, the isopods, the molluscs and the worms. I saw a few blokes slumped gloomily in tinnies, a handful of great cormorants and the contractual obligation pair of white faced heron in every cove and mudflat.

My ship building neighbour rates his sequence of ancient clapped out Mercedes according to the number of cows featured in the interior trim (“a two cow Merc”, “a four cow Merc” etc). I’m thinking I should start rating my canoeing trips similarly, according to the number of white-faced herons I see during the day. This Saturday was, by my calculation, at least a nine-heron day, and that’s not giving myself extra points for seeing the birds in pairs, hedgehog like in their full breeding regalia.

Hedgehog heron

Great cormorant in breeding plumage

White faced heron pair in breeding regalia

But all in all, there still plenty of solitude to be found out there in the mist. I’m not sure, but I may have discovered a new form of white-water canoeing. It may not be high-octane, but it’s got to be higher energy than watching Gabriel Gate on late night TV. I think I like it.

Casuarina glauca?

Pioneer mangrove

White water canoeing, right?

Round the corner from Bujwa Bay

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

July 6, 2015

Posted under

Backyard birds, Death, History, national parks, Native animals, waterways

Comments

8 Comments

Two sad islands, three whistling kites

On the way to Bar Island

It’s 7 o’clock on a midwinter Sunday morning. It’s five degrees C. And I’m about to go canoeing.

The thought that I may be slightly mad has passed through my mind. A key motivation for hauling myself out of bed before sunrise was to try to get a better look at the whistling kite that hurtled past me into the distance last time I put the kayak in at Mooney Mooney. And as I’m standing in my innovative Milan-style long-johns and wetsuit combination, what do I spy, perched in a dead tree right above the car park, but a whistling kite, defrosting in the first light. Tempting get that pic and hightail it back to bed.

First whistling kite of the day, defrosting in the first rays of sunlight

But no, Bar Island is calling me. I’m heading back to the spot where I first decided, on a boatie camping trip just up the river at Back Beaches, that my mental health demanded the purchase of a cheap canoe. And halfway across the river, when the first rays of the morning sun hit me, I feel truly blessed.

The view from Back Beaches back in Easter 2014- Bar Island just to the left of the sunrise

Easter Sunset at Back Beaches, Easter 2014

The kayak that made me fall for kayaking

Bearing in mind my favourite quote from Antonio Gramsci (“pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”), I started out my jaunt by heading across to Olga Bay. Last time I was there, a magnificent white bellied sea eagle swooped through the golden afternoon sunshine and snatched a fish from the briny right in front of the boat.

Unfortunately, convinced that the Hawkesbury was going to sweep me out to sea, at the time I had my head down, as I blasted my way across the river. The David Attenborough moment passed while I was fumbling around in the dank reaches of the canoe for my much abused camera.

Mist pouring over Muogamarra Ridge

Needless to say, the sea eagle didn’t do a repeat performance, though that Australian darter that I pursued heartlessly from perch to desperate perch up the Wyong River last weekend had an unpleasant surprise on that therapeutic holiday to a little hire cottage on Milson’s Passage that the doctor ordered.

Darter bright wings head other side crop

Bar Island under its own cloud

Mist on the water off Bar Point

Pied cormorant

Muogamarra point in the morning mist

Bar Island greeted me with the green flash of (what I think was) a sacred kingfisher watching from the mangroves as I clambered awkwardly (camera-less, of course) over the slippery rocks to the shore.

To be honest, I found it a gloomy place, weighed down by history and hemmed in by trees. They’re important trees – casuarina glauca for the glossy black cockatoos and red ash which, according to the informative signs, feeds the copper jewel butterfly. Perhaps I’ve been living with a Scotsman too long. I have started to share his culture’s love of denuded landscapes and the sweeping views created by sheep, deer and industrialisation. We’ve dubbed the accompanying fear of excessive greenery “wood psychosis”. There was a bit of wood psychosis going on in Bar Island this weekend.

And then there’s visible colonial history of the place. St John’s Church was built on Bar Island in the 1870s, and the grave stones of some of the sixty or so European settlers who are known to have been buried there remain, along with reminders of the troubled history of the Hawkesbury as a brutal contact zone. “A difficult time” as the plaque commemorated Sarah “Granny” Lewis carefully puts it.

Mist rising from the water on the shady side of the island

The best spot to be on Bar Island on a chilly winter morning was, not coincidentally, the wooden seat near the midden on the northern tip of the island. The midden’s metres deep, accrued over thousands of years of shared oyster eating by Darug, Darkinjung and Guringai people, whose country meets here.

And not far away, the resident kite and her nest, were also basking in sunlight. RB has been working here, on and off, for three years, and the nest has been there for at least that long, renovated and extended each season. The kite wasn’t moving, despite the clumsy paddling and clicking camera. It’s her island now, and she knows it.

Whistling kite owning the place

The sunny northern point of the island

Above the midden

The kite’s nest

I thought I was smart, timing my trip upstream with a rising tide. I wasn’t feeling quite so clever heading downriver again as I tried to take a racing line across an sharp S bend, with the current and the tide battling it out all round me.

First I ploughed exceedingly slowly, on that perfectly still day, through a stretch of strange standing waves. And then I found myself swirling through a sequence of weird vortices, that churned up silt and the occasional jelly blubber. I read Lisa-ann Gershwin’s Stung! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Oceans a while ago. She concludes, to put it bluntly, that we should enjoy fish while they last, as the jellyfish, floating around in the oceans since the pre-Cambrian, are on their way back with a vengeance, thanks to acidified, over-fertilised and over-fished oceans (not to mention climate change).

Catostylus mosaicus – taken on a previous trip

Underwhelming to the eye, disturbing to the timid paddler

Since then I see every jellyfish as a portent of doom. Given this slightly apocalyptic worldview, after about an hour and a half trying to escape this turbid hellhole (okay, it was about ten minutes) I began to worry that one of those whirlpools were going to suck me down into the bowels of the river, just the icefloes in this extremely spooky youtube find.

Needless to say, I survived The Whirlpool of Death. In marked contrast to many of the people who went to live at Peat Island, which I paddled past on the last leg of my route home. Built to detox alcoholics early in the twentieth century, the site was used for over ninety years mainly as an asylum for people with mental illnesses or learning difficulties. From all reports it was a horrifying place where inmates were caged, neglected and sexually abused.

Peat Island

A whistling kite whistling.

The last residents, treated somewhat less brutally than those who came before, left in 2010, and the site is now padlocked and empty, awaiting redevelopment into a 250 berth marina and suite of five storey apartment blocks. Because there’s nothing that says “high density living” and “brownfield site” like a place with national parks on all four sides.

I spotted one last whistling kite – in fact, a whistling kite actually whistling – in the Norfolk Pines on the island. And in the distance, somewhere out of view, the elusive sea eagles, honking away like a pair of castrati ducks. I know it’s sentimental in the light of these grim tales of the river, but I hope the birds are still there when the jet skiiers come to stay.

The freeway bridge that makes this a brownfield site

Hateful jet skiiers. Possibly planning real estate acquisitions.

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

June 23, 2015

Posted under

anthropocene, Geology, History, national parks, natural history, Seasons, Soil

Comments

8 Comments

Midwinter lagoon

Bombah Broadwater in the gloaming

It’s past the shortest day of the year, but, in spite of her scrapes and dings, Egg the elderly wooden kayak doesn’t seem to be ready for drydock yet. Perhaps it’s that last unseasonable whirl of autumnal warmth, caught alongside the coast in the East Australian Current, that’s keeping the sea a balmy 20 degrees. Or perhaps it’s just the lure of still, winter water all around.

Since Egg was first laid in our driveway a year ago, I’ve been seeing Sydney differently. Those long roundabout routes from A to B via M and Q and P, punctuated somewhere along the way by a bridge or two, suddenly make sense. The city of roads and buildings retreats and, I feel, just out of sight on every side, the presence of water.

The Hawkesbury estuary

Upper reaches of Berowra Creek, a hop skip and jump from the Hornsby Westfield

This is our backyard, encircled by the salty embrace of the Hawkesbury estuary. But it doesn’t end here, with the secretive topography of flooded river valleys. All the way up (and down) the New South Wales coast, the shoreline is flanked by coastal lagoons. I’m not complaining, even the tiniest little bit, about all these sheltered waters. But I’ve started to wonder what geographic accident has given a timid canoeist so much to feel grateful for.

Along with marshes and flats, coastal lagoons make up maybe 10% of the world’s seaboards, and in NSW lots of us live by them, many more than by the ocean itself. Lagoons (or wave-dominated estuaries – there are ongoing hissy-fits around these definitions) appear where low-lying plains, rather than dramatic cliffs, meet a shallow gently sloping seabed. Usually, they are found on shores shaped mainly by waves rather than big tides, with underlying rock that crumbles nicely into beach sand not finer, silty sediment.

The more sand the better – perhaps our generous continental shelf harbours this bounty from a time when the Sydney Basin was a enormous braided river delta, like the Ganges today. But you don’t want too much rain – lagoons are usually fed by an underwhelming little creek or even just groundwater – that doesn’t (or doesn’t often) burst through the land between waterway and ocean.

Dawn breaks over the barrier between Bombah Broadwater and the open sea

To make a lagoon*, you need a barrier to the open sea. In the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth century, coastal geomorphologists duked it out over just how these barriers were born. Did breaking waves make for ever-rising off-shore sand bars? Did encroaching seas submerge coastal dunes? And then there’s the third, attractively named “spit accretion theory” (Davis and Fitzgerald, 2004). Not, as it might sound, a creation myth where bunyips drool into puddles between the dunes; just sand clinging to rocky headlands as it is carried along the coast by the (delightfully piratical) longshore drift.

It turns out that everyone was right, at least some of the time. Which is nice. It’s hard to keep the heat in a scientific controversy when lots of the evidence, hidden beneath the surface of the sea in the first place, has been washed away or covered over during the last few millenia by terrestrial silt or aeolian sand. Who could be angry with such mellifluous and frankly otherworldly-sounding geomorphologies in play?

Pelican landing on Bombah Broadwater

Most lagoons have only been around for a little while, geologically speaking, formed after sea levels began to rise as glaciers melted 18,000 years ago or thereabouts. Many, like Narrabeen Lake, which we whizzed round on our bikes in the company of half the population of the North Beaches a few weeks ago, are even younger, not seven thousand years old. A blink of the eye for people who were here 50,000 years before.

Strangely, lagoons move. Today’s surfers walk across the relics of yesterday’s drowned lakes. Barrier beaches migrated landward, emerging from the ocean just as “marine transgressions” (that’s advancing oceans, not the naughtiness of waves) slowed. Shaped in stable times, coastal lakes still don’t hang around for long. This shouldn’t surprise me – I know that, despite appearances, beaches are really rivers of sand.

If the tides were higher, if the rivers was faster or siltier, if Australia wasn’t so seismically serene, the lagoons would fill up and dry out or be washed away, and the cormorants would have to hunt elsewhere. In fact, for all our dredging and draining, it’s happening right now. Like life itself, coastal lagoons are a transitory phenomenon, a passing pleasure.

Surfers floating over the relics of yesterday’s lagoon

Narrabeen Lake

Black swans in Narrabeen Lagoon

(Little?) Black cormorants

Intermediate egret in Narrabeen Lagoon

And then there’s the gyttja, something so very special it’s found nowhere else in Australia, and helps qualify Myall Lakes as a unique protected wetland. What is it? Well, rotting pondweed. No, I’m underselling it: it’s up to 70cm of “a highly mobile and organic mud that has a gelatinous appearance”, a “flocculent green–brown material” (Drew et al 2008), “an uncompacted, anoxic and sulphurous ‘ooze'” made from “the decomposition of charophytes, macrophytes, cyanobacteria and algae”. Strangely, not so much about the ooze in the National Parks brochures. But it’s an ooze that’s been there for, perhaps, a thousand years.

Dusk on Bombah Broadwater

Looking west at dawn on Bombah Broadwater

Canoeists in the gloaming

Eric the Egret on the Bombah Point Ferry

Glorious Angophora

Reflections on the tea-brown waters of Myall Lakes

Still morning on Two Mile Lake

I’ve been thinking about lies beneath the surface of the water and the windblown sand. But paddling through the Broadwater two weeks back, in a startling moment I found myself not gliding above the mysteries of quiet waterways, but surrounded, right amongst it. A huge flock, a murmuration almost, of little black cormorants, perhaps returning from a fishing trip, passed above and on one side and on the other without a single cry but with a sound I’ve never heard before: the white noise of hundreds and hundreds of moving wings.

The sound of the midwinter lagoon, all around me.

Little black cormorants murmurating

* Be warned: there’s a chance my account of the origins of coastal lagoons is completely wrong. After all, the New South Wales coast “has provoked many questions and various degrees of controversy” (Thom, 2010, 1238). And perhaps it’s “premature to attempt a comprehensive analysis of coastal lagoon evolution and dynamics when so many lagoons have been so little studied” (Bird, 1994, 13). In case you want to check my workings:

References

Bird, Erik (1994) “Physically setting and geomorphology of Coastal lagoons” in Kjerfve, B. (ed) Coastal Lagoon Processes, Elsevier
Davis, R. and Fitzgerald, D. (2004) Beaches and Coasts, Blackwell Science
Drew, Simon Iona Flett, Joanne Wilson,Henk Heijnis, C. Gregory Skilbeck (2008) “The trophic history Myall Lakes, NSW, Australia” Hydrobiologia 608
Eyre, Bradley and Damien Maher “Structure and Function of warm temperate east Australian lagoons: implications for natural and anthropogenic changes” Coastal Lagoons: Critical Habitats of Environmental Change, dited by Michael J. Kennish, Hans W. Paerl
Martin, Louis and Jose Maria Landim Dominguez (1994) “Geological history of coastal lagoons” Kjerfve, B. (ed) Coastal Lagoon Processes, Elsevier
Masselink, Gerhard and Hughes, Michael (2003) Introduction to Coastal processes and geomorphology, New York, Oxford University Press
Thom, Bruce, Hesp, Patrick, Bryant, Edward (1994) “Last glacial ‘coastal’ dunes in Eastern Australia and implications for landscape stability during the Last Glacial Maximum” Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 111 (3-4)
Thom, Bruce (2010) “New South Wales” Eric Bird (ed) Encyclopaedia of the World’s Coastal Landforms, Springer

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

May 9, 2015

Posted under

Backyard birds, Climate change, national parks, Native animals, natural history

Comments

4 Comments

Low tide at Gunyah Beach

“The sea or not the sea?”

That was the question churning through my brain, as I set out for my first solo kayak on the Hawkesbury proper. Let’s be kind and say I’m not a risk taker (there’s a reason I’m fond of chickens). And my canoe is properly vintage, made out of wafer-thin plywood back in the early 70s, and now held together by a rich tapestry of epoxy based products and amateurishly applied fibreglass. Don’t get me wrong – it was the best $100 I ever spent on ebay but our Egg is no ocean-going liner.

Slightly rotten Egg, the day i bought it for $100

Egg being cooked

A rich melange of epoxy products

Replacing the rotten carlin

But setting off on a sunny Saturday morning with a light off-shore wind and a slack tide, I thought my decrepit boat and I might just be able to brave a three kilometre paddle along the widest reaches of the Hawkesbury Estuary, from Brooklyn’s Parsley Bay to Gunyah Beach in Kuring-gai Chase national park.

In Parsley Bay

Map of my jaunt, preserved from harm in a handy ziploc bag

About midway across the 700 metres at the mouth of Porto Bay, I realised the weird rise and fall of the boat was swell, a new and disturbing experience for me as a canoeist. Well, it was either swell or the kayak was being regularly nudged sideways by bull sharks. Either way, I was not happy. It didn’t help that the choppy water was full of floating branches, torn down by last week’s big winds. If the sharks didn’t get me, I’d be turned into a giant vegetarian shishkebab by a surfing pine tree. I was in the ocean, and it was scary.

Storm detritus on Gunyah Beach

Of course, the Hawkesbury “River” is, kinda, the sea – a flooded river valley that has its tidal limit a hundred kilometres or thereabouts from its mouth. Whenever I think about this, I imagine how strange it must have been for the people living on the plains that once stretched out from the current coastline under what is now the surface of the sea, as the ocean crept slowly up, over ten thousand years, claiming the valleys carved out by the river, pushing people before it into the hills. Now that’s really going into the unknown.

Waterfall from a hanging valley

In the end, of course, I made my little paddle with no problems at all, apart from an annoying lack of photographic evidence that there was ever anything to fear. Gunyah Beach (boat access only) even had its own lounge suite on which an unnerved canoeist might rest and recover. I’m pretty sure the contractual obligation white-faced heron had just stood up after a cup of tea and a chocolate digestive as I arrived.

Ah, a comfy sofa.

Everyone’s been on the beach

Contractual obligation white-faced heron

Striated heron http://birdlife.org.au/bird-profile/striated-heron

Low tide in the creek

White cheeked honeyeaters – everywhere!

Stumbling through the mud around the beach-side lagoon, I found myself in a maelstrom of silvereyes and white cheeked honeyeaters. I’ve come to realise binaural hearing is a real asset for bird watching. With one dodgy cochlea I spent half my time whipping my head wildly from one side to the other to work out where the chirping was coming from. In the end taking random pictures of the bushes seemed the best way to avoid permanent neck injury. I was disproportionately pleased with the few photos that worked out. There’s something particularly delightful about the most minor victories over timidity and incompetence, even if you can’t convincingly frame pootling around in boats in your estuarine backyard as some kind of heroic feminist re-enactment of The Old Man and the Sea.

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

February 19, 2015

Posted under

Backyard birds, Geology, national parks, Native animals, Weeds

Comments

9 Comments

What’s at the bottom of the garden?

Where does our backyard end? The unwary burglar or, more plausibly, brush turkey fetishist leaping over the back fence and finding themselves falling off the small but perfectly formed cliff between our place and our downhill neighbours might think the answer obvious. But clearly, property boundaries don’t mean a lot to the brush turkeys or the bowerbirds. As far as they’re concerned, our backyard is just a part of Berowra Valley National Park with better snacks.

And since our yard is, in essence, a part-time storm drain, you could say that this is where our backyard ends:

Waterfall into Berowra creek after rain

Dusty Hole marina, Berowra Creek

Sometimes the view from the deck seems like a theatre backdrop, an artful two dimensional screen behind our suburban dramas. Every evening, the cockies, wheeling and screeching, burst through the scenic backcloth. Last weekend, a bit more quietly (bar the kayak-onto-roofrack related cursing) I did the same, plunging into the dawn mist towards the very bottom of the garden, the watery end point of our backyard.

Sam’s Creek in the mist

In the 1990s, Berowra Creek was not a good place to be a fish. Sewage outflows from waterside communities at Dusty Hole and Berowra Waters and the landlubber suburbs to the south meant algal blooms, brick red water and floating fish. As the cheery Hornsby Shire Biodiversity Plan ten years back noted “Some parts of the tributary creeks in the Berowra Creek catchment feature weed invasion, garden plants and waste, streambed siltation, rubbish and gross pollutants from stormwater drains, bank erosion, undercutting, tree death and poor water quality” (2006, 28). It’s enough to make a gardener think long and hard about what might wash down the hill in the next heavy rain.

Thankfully there’s a whole lot less nitrogen going into the creek these days largely thanks to better poo processing. I don’t have a lot of interest in fish. I don’t eat them, they make rubbish cuddly pets and they lay very tiny eggs far too infrequently. But even to my disinterested eye, the backwaters and mangrove flats of the estuary look like fish paradise. Okay, fish paradise probably doesn’t feature stingrays, cormorants or osprey, but you get my point.

Fishermen (I use that term advisedly) out well before the birds

Welcome swallow still in fluffy slippers and bathrobe

Male and female Chestnut Teal completing their morning ablutions

Fishermen get up earlier than kingfishers, it seems. People who say they’re “up with the birds” or even, in that eloquent Australianism “up before sparrow fart”, are clearly lying through their teeth. The welcome swallows were barely out of the fluffy slippers and the ducks were still brushing their hair and cleaning their teeth, but the fishermen of the Hawkesbury were already out on the water, lurking in quiet bays or drifting mid-channel like tinny Mary Celestes.

The feathered fisherfolk only seemed to appear after the mist began to rise. I’m not sure whether I can attribute that to poor avian night vision or my water spattered multifocals. You’ve got to assume the rufous night heron can see in the dark, but I only saw it scoop up a take-away in a kind of disgruntled way, after some annoying canoeist with an inadequate zoom lens made a nap in the mangroves untenable, and that was long after sunrise.

Mist rising over Berowra Valley National Park

Very patient and faintly curious juvenile white faced heron

Into Joe Craft Bay

Mist rising

White faced heron fishing

Rufous night heron trying to get some shut eye

Miffed night heron, off for a take-away on the way homee

For all the wildlife in these parts, that sharp edged snap of an azure kingfisher sparkling in flight is as much beyond me as a decent crop of salad potatoes, it seems. But I’m not going to complain. Over the last few weeks I’ve seen plenty of boats with girls’ names, but I haven’t seen too many Rubys, Calistas or Beverleys actually messing about in boats. There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden and there are certainly plenty of fish, but there don’t seem to be quite as many fishwives. Seems like it’s a rare privilege to be Her Outdoors.

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

January 21, 2015

Posted under

Australian natives, Backyard birds, national parks, natural history, predation

Comments

5 Comments

Backyard bounty

Okay, only metaphorically our backyard… but we got there on foot in less than ninety minutes, and that’s at child pace. In my own garden, the cut the critters take makes me want to weep. It’s a lot more fun watching the surplus of Waratah Bay feeding the locals.

The light blue soldier crab, Mictyris longicarpus

Soldier crabs being rounded up by the kids. Sorry guys.

Light blue soldier crab, coming to get me

A crab-eating goanna was a first for me.

Crab eating goanna looking pretty happy

Goanna digging for crabs

A decent mouthful

Even a bunch of yelling kids couldn’t drive this white-faced heron from a great seafood buffet.

White faced heron hunting at low tide

Heron eating a crab

And this time a squid.

No pics of the circling white-bellied sea eagle, but you’ll be pleased to know, it too caught a fish.

One of Sydney’s “lungs” – Kuring-gai National Park

Mangroves

Epacris longifolia flowering a metre or two from the tideline

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

January 6, 2015

Posted under

Backyard birds, Geology, national parks, Native animals, natural history, Soil, Weather

Comments

4 Comments

In other sandstone country

Ganguddy – a less misleading name than Dunn’s Swamp

Wiradjuri country that is, or Dabee country to be precise: Ganguddy, on the Cudgegong River, that flows west off the Great Dividing Range, not into the Pacific but into the Murray-Darling. Not far from Berowra as the Australian Raven flies – straight across the Wollemi National Park – but a fair trek in the excessively laden ancient vehicle.

Still sandstone though – the older, niftier sandstone of the Narrabeen Group, as it resurfaces at the very edge of the Sydney Basin, with the even older coal measures being mined perilously close by. Layers of ironstone make for fabulous rock formations (if slightly less way out than the famous pagodas of the nearby Gardens of Stone National Park). And of course exceedingly soggy tent groundsheets when big rain sluices off the rocks faster than even sandy soil can soak it up.

Ganguddy

Rock formations

Pagoda

Pagoda lookout

When even sandstone soils can’t absorb the rain

Lakeside sandstone rock formations

Same old sandstone geology, plenty of still water, just like the Hawkesbury estuary down our way, but the critters are different. The feathered food thief at Ganguddy isn’t a brush turkey, it’s the purple swamp hen.

Purple swamp hen posing

Purple swamp hen unperturbed by a flotilla of canoes

Purple swamp hen justifying its name by hanging out in a swamp

Purple swamp hens enjoying the puddles after rain

The “house bird” is a cheeky superb blue wren, not a wattlebird. Rainbow lorikeets – not a one. And none of those aggressive urban generalists, the noisy minors or the magpies, either. Instead crimson rosellas – a rarity in the northern suburbs of Sydney – lurk in implausible locations like the queue for the drop dunny for instance, or the reeds by the river bank.

The ubiquitous but largely invisible bird here isn’t a koel or a channel billed cuckoo but the aptly named clamorous reed warbler. I was at times tempted to nip to the Rylstone Guns and Ammo for a small flame thrower so I could finally get that photograph, but then I reflected that a perfectly focussed snap of a tiny blackened corpse clinging in its rictus to a reed probably wasn’t in the spirit of the thing.

The “house bird”: a male superb blue wren

Crimson rosella waiting impatiently for the drop dunny

The invisible but ubiquitous clamorous reed warbler

Crimson rosella doing unlikely things in the reeds

Little black cormorants watching cricket.

A whiptail wallaby (or “pretty faced” wallaby as fellow kangaroo mafioso prefer to refer to it)

A musk duck. No, it doesn’t have a goitre. It’s meant to look that way.

Eastern water dragon enjoying the attentions of the papperazzi.

Paper daisies.

Thysanotus tuberosus. Another one that’s all over the place.

A teenaged darter hanging out in the local equivalent of a bus stop.

Not just charismatic megafauna. A Botany Bay Weevil.

Lace monitor. Okay, we see these at home too.

Eurasian coots in the mist. Not a good movie title.

A fabulous place. It’s tempting, what with proximity to World Heritage listed Wollemi National Park and all, to think of it as a wilderness. But no. Its gorgeous waterways are the product of a 1920s dam built to to supply a cement works, its teeming fish the introduced gambusia affinis – the “plague minnow” – that outcompetes the locals, though it does seems to keep the mosquito population down. As a camper it’s hard to argue with that, although we didn’t see a single bat, micro, macro or meso, during our five day stay.

There’s something to be said for human intervention, as Tim Low says. In the absence of railway station eves or even a well put together shed, the welcome swallows in desperation had to resort to nesting on the natural stone outcrops. But the local water dragons and turtles seemed to relish the fetid smelling pond downstream from the dam.

A water dragon – is it a grotty eastern or is it something exotic?

Gambezi fish – mosquito killers or just killers?

Welcome swallows making do with a natural rock outcrop rather than the eves of a railway station or public toilet

A tranquil place with a violent past. A “natural” place shaped for a very long time by people in ways that you see and ways that you (or at least I) don’t know enough to notice. A familiar story, on sandstone and otherwise.

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

October 17, 2014

Posted under

Australian natives, Garden trees, Gardening, national parks, Natives for shade, Permaculture, Plants and what I know about them

Comments

1 Comment

Black wattle and a pile of rotting logs

We missed the October snowstorm in the Blue Mountains by a week, dammit. But as we walked the historic (if annoyingly snow flake free) National Pass last weekend I suddenly realised why my callicoma serrata has been struggling in its spot right next to a humungous, thirsty pine tree.

Wentworth Falls, home of many contented callicoma plants

Black wattle dangling its feet in the pool above Wentworth Falls

and another splashed by the spray from the falls

On the moist Undercliff path

Despite the lack of a 200 metre waterfall in our garden, our black wattle is finally enjoying life enough to flower. A rainy August probably helped, but I reckon our extreme torpor also played a role. A few weeks back, our helpful neighbours stacked the severed remains of a casuarina tree on our side of the fence, right round the base of the callicoma. It took us a while to move the logs into the woodshed and I suspect the callicoma enjoyed the hyper-mulch experience.

This unexpected flowering made me think again about hugelkultur – growing stuff in raised beds on top of a moisture-absorbing stack of rotting logs. The idea has some appeal and it’s not just the fact that the word reminds me of delicious German pastries. I’ve sometimes toyed with ad hoc terracing of the part of the garden into which storm water is unceremoniously decanted after big rain. Since the yard is full of piles of wood, “hugelswales” (surely the name of a lime green chest of drawers in the IKEA children’s department) may be the way forward.

I admit, there’s a faintly faddish feel about the hugeltalk. I’ve got a pretty good idea that eventually it will go the way of my superannuated chicken dome, parked up like a rusted out combi van at the bottom of the paddock, only used by weary, equally superannuated chickens. But what the hell, may as well give this hippie thing a bit of a spin before we put her up on the blocks.

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

September 13, 2014

Posted under

Australian natives, national parks, natural history, Plants and what I know about them, Seasons

Comments

2 Comments

Sprinter (not yet Sprummer)

Clematis aristata (I think!). Or is it clematis glycinoides?

Grevillea sericea

Grevillea buxifolia

Eutaxia obovata and boronia microphyllia (I think!)

Clueless.

Gompholobium virgatum ?

Isopogon anethefolia?

Hakea salicifolia

Glossodia… minor? major? Some kind of

Lysinemas? Is that even a flower?

No idea

Pretty.

Sprinter (not yet sprummer)

Phlebalium? Or something?

Eriostemon australasia (probably)

Tim Entwhistle from the Royal Botanical Gardens suggests we add two seasons to the European standards: starting out with the clunkingly named Sprinter, to describe late winter and early spring when most things seem to burst into flower. He reckons non-Indigenous Australians can’t handle the complexity of the diverse seasons observed by Kooris, Murris, Nunga, Noongar and all the first people of this place.

He’s probably right. The D’harawal calendar – from people south of Port Jackson – says roundabout now is the time of Wiritjiribin – cold and windy. I think I saw Acacia floribunda blooming today, so that fits. But maybe, since its getting warmer, it’s closer to the time of Ngoonungi, the time of the gathering of the flying foxes? “They come in from the north-east, the north, the north-west and the west, and swirl over the Sydney area in a wonderful, sky-dancing display just after sunset”, says the D’harawal calendar on the BOM. No signs here at least, in Dharug and Guringai country, of flying foxes yet.

Let’s face it: I’m clueless. I’ve got no idea about the local wildlife, know nothing of how you might live off the land, can’t even figure out half the Latin names of the flowers in our neck of the woods – Muogamarra, Berowra National Park, Lane Cove.

Ok, I’m cheating. Lane Cove is miles away, but I took some nice pictures there yesterday. And it is (mostly) on Hawkesbury sandstone. And they have a great website for the local flora. Which is important because this is what our plant identification book looks like:

All in all, I think I’m only up to Sprinter.

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

April 22, 2014

Posted under

Australian natives, Gardening, Greens, national parks, Natives for shade, Plants and what I know about them

Comments

3 Comments

Two easy steps to make your warrigal greens thrive

We had a break from the back garden this weekend, camping at Twin Beaches in Marramarra National Park on the beautiful drowned river valley that is the Hawkesbury estuary. The east-facing wooded slope up the back of the camp site was object lesson in how to use the shade-loving local plants I’ve been bringing back into my garden over the last couple of years. Particularly gorgeous was the swathe of prickly rasp fern, tendrils fresh and pink after recent rain, appearing through the grass and the dianella caerulea along the path to the dangerously repellant pit toilet.

I haven’t yet managed to propagate a cissus vine – I am working on some cissus antarctica cuttings pinched from a nicely planted up children’s playground. Since it is a national park and I am slightly neurotic, I would have felt guilty if I had snipped off some propagation material from the vine that wound its way through the trees – a slender young cissus hypoglauca, I believe. Apparently you can cut the stems of the mature vine into sections and drink the sap that drips out like water.

But most impressive was the dense carpet of exceedingly healthy looking warrigal greens growing only a metre or two back from the high tide line. I did end up picking some to stave off the scurvy likely to be induced by too much camping food. However it was a bit of a challenge to find a satisfactory spot for my ad hoc harvest, since the most vibrant and sturdy patches of tetragonia seemed to be in just those places – a couple of steps from the fire hole, around the base of a convenient tree – that a bloke might choose to relieve himself after putting away a couple of long necks. This may be a coincidence of course. But nettles and lime trees seem to favour human urine as a tonic so who knows, maybe New Zealand spinach is the same? I know it’s sterile and Romans used it to wash their togas and all, but I’m not completely sure I’m going to try this particular high-nitrogen fertiliser on the salad greens at home.