Jaws? Jaws schmaws!

For those of you who dropped in looking for Wild Flower Watch I must apologise.
Yesterday was rainy and wet and today family business took us up the Yarra Valley.

After our business was concluded we went for a picnic by the Upper Yarra River. The area we were in was not in the National Park so Lilli came with us.
As you know Lilli is a ball retrieving maniac.  Well one of the things she likes more than retrieving a ball is retrieving a ball and getting wet doing it!

So this little photo essay is about Lilli and her imitation of a fearsome aquatic beast.

Lilli standing at the edge of the river beseeching Lu (my youngest) to throw the ball.


Lilly leaping energetically into the current after said ball.


Closing in for a kill! Jaws has nothing on Lilli!


Doing what most Labradors do best: retrieving!


Landing with  her prey.


And finally, sharing the fun!


Now for those of you who didn’t get a wild flower fix

This lovely callistemon was growing on the Yarra river bank.


There are dozens of species of callistemons in all sorts of colours, from this lemon, to purples, pinks and reds. A number of species have the common name of “bottle-brush” and you can see why!

Happy New Year and an Answer

Well this week no one was even close to guessing what this image was.It really was droplets of water cascading off our excited pup Lilli on Christmas day.Many of the places we go on our weekends are National Parks so dogs are banned. But for our Xmas BBQ last Sunday we went to a spot on the Yarra River where dogs are welcome. Our Girls and Lilli had a great time in the water.

A ball, water and getting to run around - a mix that is pretty close to heaven for a Labrador!

You will have to forgive me but this rather silly story has just popped into my head while I look at these photos.

"I can't see my ball. Can you?'"No mate, I can't""Lu, I've lost my ball, can you see it?""We can't see it either""Found it!""Now back into the water."Lilli did actually lose two balls on the day.
Lucky we travel with spares.
As to the Kookaburras, they were busy hunting for food for their young on the ground along the river.

Abbotsford

I started my new job yesterday. It all feels very new and truth be told there is a massive learning curve ahead of me.

It was in at the deep end. Half of yesterday was spent in formal induction. Then it was straight into team meetings to meet the team I will be managing and to meet the larger section we are integrated within.

Now for something completely different. On Saturday we had a bright day so Deb and I were out and about. Neither of us had much energy so we went in the direction of the city.

Once again our focus was the Yarra River. I wanted to catch piccies of a cascade known as Dight’s Falls. The falls are right near the heart of the city in the old industrial suburb Abbotsford.

Unfortunately there was a construction site on the river bank there so I couldn’t get close.Then I noticed a look out high up on the other side. I had to go a long way around. Nearly a mile downstream to cross a road bridge. Then it was into a patch of bush that follows the river almost all the way into the city.

I paused to catch these piccies of delicate Eucalyptus tree flowers. Then I had to stop and catch this view of the city. My new office is half way up one of these skyscrapers.

Then I heard something familiar, I turned and scanned the tree tops.

Can you see what I saw?
The noise was the gentle sounds of cockatoos ‘talking’ to each other .

High in the trees – a flock of Yellow-Tailed Black Cockatoos Calyptorhynchus funereusI have never managed to get decent photos of these large (two foot long) parrots before.

So I began to stalk closer. I managed to get a little closer,But I spooked this shy fellow.

She took off with an alarm call which caused all the others to take to the air.
I managed to snap this very out of focus shot before she disappeared through the trees. You can see why they are called ‘yellow-tailed’. There is a related species called ‘red-tailed’.

I went a little further to the look out. It wasn’t a great vantage point after all. But I did manage to get a few nice piccies of boulders in the torrent.

Pound Bend and a (Not) Drinking Lizard

More on the subject of lizards (drinking or otherwise) in a moment.

I’m not going to post any more of our Tassie trip today. Instead I’m going to yarn about a walk Deb and I did a couple of weeks ago.

A few weeks ago Deb and I had a Sunday to kill. We had a lazy lunch at a café we frequent called ‘Wild Wombat’. Then we drove to a Melbourne suburb called Warrandyte for a walk along a stretch of the Yarra River.You wouldn’t think you were in a suburb of Melbourne - here the river meanders through a number of bush reserves.
The lower Yarra is often very brown, but this stretch is usually clear. This muddy look is from all the rain we have had this summer.

We followed these rough stairs down to the river’s edge.There at the bottom about half of the river’s flow seems to be making its way towards the cliff face.I scrambled to the corner to show you why. Meet the “Pound Bend Tunnel”.The tunnel is an artefact of the gold rush period in the 1870s. Miners diverted the river so they could get access to the river bed to search for alluvial gold.
The faint circle in the middle of the piccie is from a stray beam of sunlight filtering down from above and catching my camera lens.

Then as I turned to look back up the river… I noticed a local was checking me out. Can you see?This guy is a Golden Water Skink (Eulamprus quoyii) I think he/she is very handsome. He/she is a medium sized member of this species probably about 20cm (8in) long.
They are one of around 400 species of skink lizards native to Oz (we have about 800 lizard species in all).
Now speaking of lizards.
Last Thursday I challenged you to guess what the slang term ‘flat out like a lizard drinking’ meant.
The key to the phrase is simply in the first two words ‘flat out’. So for most Aussies ‘flat out like a lizard drinking’ means ‘very busy’. Fair dinkum!

Wet, Wet, Wet.

First up some house keeping -

Welcome to any who have found their way here through Karen G’s Labor Day BBQ Blog-o-rama.

Second: My Sunday Swan watch will have to be temporarily suspended. It isn’t through a lack of trying, but our Swan family are not at the moment to be found.
Don’t panic, I doubt anything untoward has happened to them. Rather as I’ll point out below the weather down this way has been very suitable for swans, ducks and the like. This has meant the nearby area available for our swans has gone from probably 20 acres of wetlands to hundreds of acres. This is due to higher water levels allowing them easy access to other channels and ponds. I have hunted for them on a number of occasions as has my daughter Io, but with no results.

Finally: Thank you to all who expressed concern for Deb after her fall. She is almost entirely better with all aches and pains pretty much gone.

Now on to my post for tonight…

Poor Victoria has been lashed by torrential rains over the past twenty-four hours.

On top of an already wet winter this has meant significant flooding in the north of the state.
Again – don’t panic, down in the south - central where we are, the rainfall has been much lower with only nuisance localised flooding.

As is usual Deb and I were out and about. We headed in the direction of one of our favourite haunts, the Upper Yarra Valley.

Well the Yarra River has burst its banks.
Back in February I posted this piccie of the river.Today from the same point the scene is a bit different.I didn’t post this picture, but it shows Deb’s brother-in-law David and our niece Kennedy on the same day.They are sitting at a picnic bench in a park near the river.

I don’t think we’d use the bench today.But for many local residents life goes on as normal.

The Happy Wanderer is showing its first flush of spring flowers.This big gum tree will be happy at a good drink after so many years of drought.And these Sulphur Crested Cockatoos weren’t bothered by the rain, but they only put up with me getting so close before flying off.On our way home we paused so I could capture some shots of people driving on moderately flooded roads.

Some being sensible, took it slowly.While others raced through the water (today we saw one person flood their motor this way).

I guess this farmer won’t be getting machinery on his field any time soon.One last shot of more flooded paddocks I took on the way home. As you can see from the clouds it looks like we are in for more rain.

Warm

I have just been talking to my Brother in the UK and he has describing the Arctic conditions they are “enjoying” up there.

We have also been enjoying “terrible” weather 34°C (93°F) and glorious. Someone’s gotta do it!

To cool off we drove out to the Upper Yarra to have a play in the water.
We were still mucking around in the early evening.
In the dim light down in the shaded river valley someone, either Deb or one of the older girls got behind my camera.
The piccie shows Lu and I going down a slightly quicker part of the stream. Because of the low light, and because the camera was set for bright light earlier in the day the shutter speed has “auto” corrected to a very long exposure.
Here are the results, the camera makes it look as if we are rushing down a real rapid.
But perhaps I shouldn’t crow too much. The bureau is predicting 41°(106°F) by Monday. That is uncomfortably hot, and I’ll be back at work.

Sunday

Deb having arrived back from her conference on Saturday, we went out for a Sunday Drive. The Upper Yarra Valley beckoned again, because it is gorgeous and only an hour away from our front door.

After miserable weather all week, we had glorious spring weather on the weekend. Saturday it was sunny and 27°C (81°F) while on Sunday it was still sunny and still a respectable 22°C (72°F). 22° is warm enough for this Aussie to leave his coat in the car (although not leave his sweater behind).

We shot out to the park at the Upper Yarra Reservoir.
We sat at this funny little table in the park to eat.
I've included a picture showing the detail of one of the tree trunks. Unlike the deciduous trees of the northern hemisphere most of ours are evergreen Eucalyptus species. Instead of shedding their leaves in autumn many of our trees shed bark as they grow in the warmer months.
For those of you who live in the US you can see trees similar to this in California. California has millions of Sydney Blue Gums that have run wild. They are beautiful trees but they are a weed in California and they are part of the reason for the extreme wildfires they get there. Eucalyptus oil is highly flammable!

As a by the bye the fires in Portugal a while ago were also burning in Blue Gum forest. My brother who is a UK resident and holidays in Portugal says Blue Gums are so widespread there that a lot of the locals don't even realise they are not native to Portugal.

Near the picnic area is an old waterwheel.
The wheel is an original one from the 1870's. The frame and flume are mock-ups from when the wheel was moved here. Originally the wheel was used to run a lighting generator and stamper battery for a gold mine near here. When the mine closed down the wheel and lighting plant were bought by an enterprising local publican to light his hotel.
Finally in the 1950s the pub was due to be flooded when the dam was built so the wheel was salvaged to act as a sort of memorial to earlier times.

After lunch we meandered back along the valley towards Warburton. On the way we stopped to see another relic of gold mining in the area. The "Big Peninsula Tunnel", I posted about this tunnel's little sibling a while ago.
The "big" tunnel was cut for the same reason, to allow a section of the Yarra's bed to be mined for alluvial gold.

To get to the tunnel you climb down the side of a ridge and come to the river where the Parks Authority has installed an unusual means of getting across: Then you come to the tunnel which is a lot larger than its downstream mate:
Just for a change I got out from behind the camera to have a closer look:
Back in the car we headed towards Melbourne, stopping a couple of times to take advantage of the afternoon light to snap a couple (of hundred) photos.Warburton lies about 20 km (12 miles) behind the low ridge in the middle distance.
And just because I love this piece of countryside so much a final photo.
Mount Donna Buang is the third mountain (at the back) on the left-hand side. To give some sense of scale the black dots near the right hand side are cows.

As an interesting (and probably useless) piece of trivia the blue tinge the mountains show here is a result of a fine out-gassing of Eucalyptus oil from the leaves in the warm weather. Not surprising they're so flammable!