Wild purple

Even before Spring had officially sprung, the forest began to deck itself in royal purple.

Twining up saplings, threading through the spiky clumps of Lomandra and Dianella, or just running for glory through the grass — the Purple Coral Pea, Hardenbergia Violacea.

It’s also called False Sarsparilla, which doesn’t seem fair, as it’s just being itself, as if that isn’t gorgeous enough. The tough, heavily-veined leaves you can see here belong to it.

Much less showy, in fact so shy that it takes a lot of careful and close looking to find it, is the Wild Violet, Viola betonicifolia.

It’s also called the Purple Violet, which seemed a bit silly to me, but then they could hardly say the Violet Violet, could they?

It has distinctive long sword-shaped serrated leaves at the base of the single stem, if you’re looking out of season: you can see two in this photo, at roughly 12 and 3 o’clock.

Brotherburras


These two Laughing Kookaburras decided to share my occasional bird feeder.

Not that they were interested in birdseed, but it made a good vantage point for wormwatching.

They weren’t into team diving, however, and they wouldn’t have shared the worm.

Probably siblings from one of the large kookaburra family tribes on my place, they’d be used to helping feed younger brothers or sisters, so maybe they were hunting to take back to the nest.

Sky lords


No, that’s not fly dirt on the picture — it’s the pair of wedge-tailed eagles who lord it over the upper skies here, and have done for the 30 years I’ve been here. They usually have a third in tow, their young one.

They cruise so high up it’s amazing they can spot anything down here on the ground. Their eyesight is equal to ours when using binoculars with 20 times magnification powers.

No other bird can make it up there, although the magpies will chase eagles a long way above the treeline.

I zoom in to check, but oh yes, it’s the wedgies.

A protected joey


Walking through my forest, I often come across small groups of Eastern Red-necked Wallabies. On this occasion there were three, who propped and watched me.

Sometimes they take flight, but mostly not, because this being a wildlife refuge, they are used to not needing to fear me or what I allow to happen here. No guns or dogs or roads for careless cars.

I was especially taken with the innocence of this joey, who didn’t move at all, just watched, big eyed, its little black paws relaxed against its pale furry tummy. We looked at each other for some time. It didn’t mind the camera. It’s been born here and will grow up here, as protected as I can manage.

Echidna slaughter


It is somehow worse to see an echidna roadkill than a wallaby. Not only because I see them less often, but because they are so unmistakably not dreaming but dead.

I see wallabies dozing in all sorts of odd poses, but I have never seen a live echidna on its back. The spines are there to protect it from predators; it rolls into a tight spiky ball when threatened.

Yet here it is, the soft underside helplessly exposed, the strong-clawed paws that would have dug it to safety outflung, stiff and useless.

Neither its spikes nor its claws were any defence against the uncaring, unstopping driver of the vehicle that bowled it for six – and out. Echidna-, not manslaughter, hit and run, and yet no one will be punished for this.

Duck duo

The Wood Ducks, or Maned Wood Ducks as they are often called, mostly hang out at the big dam, as the magpies shoo them off the small dam below the house.

But the other day the maggie sentinels must have been on a break, for I spotted the handsome couple pecking about in the grass on the bank.

By the time I got there with the camera, they’d taken flight. I waited as they wheeled about and headed down to land on the water.

I snapped this shot of the female as she hit the water, her mane feathers fluffed and her wings not yet folded back down.

Because her mane is brown like her head it’s usually not as noticeable as her partner’s black one.

Overall, she has the soft patterning while he gets the smart tuxedo look.

Fungi favour orange

The cleared slope was a fairly uniformly well-grazed green. Except for a spot of orange today.

I walked over to see what it was and found a small cluster of coral fungi blooming fleshily all by itself in the middle of nowhere.

A species of Ramaria, it would seem, or else paprika cauliflower cheese made from a rather spindly cauli.

Back home another incongruous splash of orange drew me to the orchard, to the sawn-off base of a self-sown avocado tree who’d had 10 years to prove it could fruit, and didn’t, meanwhile shading my vegie patch.

It was ringed with tough orange frilly fans, while others were elegantly striped, in less garish cream and grey and brown. I think it’s Trametes versicolor.

On top of the stump was a cluster of funny little greenish-grey nubs, like lost teeth. What they are I cannot imagine!

Wary wood ducks


Walking inside a cloud makes for mystery, not clarity. At 3000 feet up, I get a lot of cloud visits.

My large double dam, slowly being throttled by reeds, was floating in the filtered light of thin cloud as I walked around it.

Through the reeds I spotted a pair of wood ducks. I crept towards them, but as usual they sensed me coming, and headed off into the mist.

This shy and very elegant native duck is my most common water visitor.

The male has less patterning on his body and a chestnut brown head, and if you look carefully at the peek shot of them amongst the reeds, you can see the black strip of mane at the back of his head – he is sometimes called a Maned Wood Duck.

The female is a softly spotted grey, with white stripes across her brown head, although you can’t see that in these misty pics.

Until they are grown up, the young ones of both sexes look like their mum.

Frilly fungi


I never cease to be amazed by the apparently infinite variety of fungi here. I keep discovering ones that I’ve never seen before, like this colony of banded and frilly bonnets in Indian red and brown.

Mostly quite small, about 35mm diameter, they were growing on a dead branch on a live stringybark tree, almost spiralling up its length.

Yes, I’ve looked them up and no, I couldn’t find out just what they are.

I’m hoping one of my website visitors will tell me their name, but I guess the fungi experts keep discovering new ones too.

Bush rat babies


For weeks I’d been trying to find and block every hole where a bush rat had been getting into my cabin.

It tunnelled anew under the rock and cement footings each night. It gnawed plastic, seeds, photo albums and – unforgivably – books.

It had to go. I borrowed a live trap big enough to take the critter I saw race along the same rafter each night.

The friend lent me two so I set them both, using apple spread with peanut butter as ‘bait’.

Next morning I had two mini bush rats – ‘it’ must have been a ‘she’.

Quite cute for rats, but nevertheless they were relocated.

The next day I caught Mum. I was heading to Sydney that day so she rode with me to the spot where the kids had been ejected.

So for the next few days in the city it was not only the dried mud on the Suzi but the rat cage in the back that gave us away as bushies.

Library nursery

wasp nest
My little cabin is lined where possible with bookshelves, unfortunately only one of which has glazed doors. They are all tightly packed. I need more house for more walls for more bookshelves.

If I haven’t disturbed a section of the open shelves for a while, it often happens that when I go to extract a book, it resists.

More determined tugging brings forth not only the book but a shower of dried mud and small spiders – or perhaps fat grubs.

For wasps like books too. They sandwich the tops together with a mud honeycomb of egg chambers, sealing within each a stunned spider for the larvae to eat when they hatch.

Clever, yes, but pretty disgusting for the would-be reader.