A long story to a short answer

A few weeks ago most of the five of us (Deb + me, E our eldest and Lu our youngest) went for a weekend drive to part of the Gippsland coast in east Victoria.
Io stayed home with Lilli (no dogs allowed in national parks in Oz)

It was by our standards a fairly short run of only about 2 and a half hours drive each way.
Anyway after having a relaxed lunch and poking around a bit we ended up at the rugged coast line between Cape Paterson and Inverloch.

Deb and Lu looked at the weather,

which was really threatening to rain and elected to stay near the car.

E and I decided to climb the stairs down to the beach to have a look at the rocks out towards this interesting feature called “The Eagles’ Nest”.


To give an idea of scale I would guess it is around 5 stories high with the cliffs about double that.

Despite the threatening storm and the late afternoon we took advantage of the fact that the tide was falling quickly. You can see as we crossed the area the platform was becoming exposed by the retreating tide.

Interestingly the rock platform at the base  is made up of sedimentary rock that was formed on a flood plain back in the Cretaceous about 115,000,000 years ago.

One beach to the east is the only current dinosaur fossil dig in Victoria known as the “Dinosaur Dreaming” dig. And in 1903 just to the west was the first discovery of a dinosaur fossil in Oz known as  the “Cape Paterson Claw”.
So as well as the usual hunt for starfish and periwinkles I had my eye open for fossils.
As we got closer to the Eagles’ Nest
I began noticing literally dozens of chunks of petrified wood in the stone.
This was the largest piece we found.
I like the way the water was rippling across it in this piccie.

And from another angle with E’s hand to give a scale.

As you can see it was a decent size and beautifully preserved. It was hard to believe it felt like solid rock, not wood, to the touch.

Now we come to part of the point of this whole story.
One of the local denizens was this White-faced Heron, Egretta novaehollandiae

I took a few shots of him before he took off.

For those of you who guessed feathers for this image you were 100% right.
 
Here is the un-cropped piccie

I told you I wasn’t going to be tricky!

Sunday Swan Watch V: Cuteness Overload

Inevitably I found some minor errors with my proof copy of Veiled in Shadows. So I have uploaded a corrected version to LightningSource (my printers). No doubt when I check it again there will still be minor issues. Unfortunately, the reality is that no matter how many times you check a book there will always be more things you can correct.

However, I guess that this time it will be a case of enough is enough and I will approve the proof. This means that the book should be available in print in two to four weeks.

In the mean time I have begun reformatting (again) the corrected copy to get it ready for a Kindle (and other e-formats) edition. It should be ready for e-readers at about the same time the print copy becomes available.

Now to Swan Watch for the week.

I found our swans with much more ease this week. The little family was grazing on the lawn bedside the pond.Mum (dad was close by) would walk a short distance with the babies waddling behind. Then the cygnets would flop down on the grass.The babies have grown, but they still resemble cute fuzz-balls more than anything else.
The cygnets look intently at blades of grassbefore reaching across with their necks, that are hinting of the sinuous length they will one day have, to pluck one that looks appetising enough.

Meanwhile mum fusses around to make sure they are safe.While dad keeps both eyes on me to make sure I am not getting too close.Another close up of the babies.On another pond a few hundred metres away a chestnut teal is also raising a family.When she realised I was watching she quickly lead her brood into some reed beds. I wandered around to the other side of her pond to see if I could get a closer shot. This gave me a bonus, I spotted this white-faced heron hunting in the thicker vegetation.He/she was quite successfully catching little fish.