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!

Wild Weather (and an embarrassing anecdote)

Down here in the south of the world it is winter.

Cold wet and (potentially) miserable. Not to be daunted by minor inconveniences like the weather we headed off to the east coast of Victoria.

Not far from Inverloch we paused so I could take some piccies of this abandoned railway trestle bridge.At least abandoned in the sense that it no longer carries a railway. It has been converted to a foot bridge on part of a coastal walk.

Just how close to the coast is shown by this shot under the bridge.
By now the wind was driving a bank of cloud in off Bass Strait. But not all was gloomy, this Callistemon was flowering nearby.
Back in the car we drove along to Venus Bay.

We walked down this path through the coastal heathland to the beach.
I doubt any swimmers would be around to need this sign today.The wind was driving the sea onto the shore and it was now very unpleasant.
But a few hardy individuals were not giving up their fishing for anything.
On the way back up to the car I paused to catch a photo of this beggar (not a good photo I am afraid). A bull ant, these guys are the largest ant in the world. This one was about an inch and a half long.
They are common around Oz, are very aggressive and have a vicious sting.

I had an unfortunate experience with one back in my university days.

Picture if you will Al and Deb making their way along a busy path of the University of New England back in the 1980s. It is a bright sunny day and there are plenty of people around.

All of a sudden Al grabs at his upper thigh and begins dancing around. ‘Something’s in my daks’
Deb looks alarmed, ‘What’s wrong?’
Al continues frantically dancing and clutching at his groin, ‘Ouch, ouch, ouch!’
‘Get your pants off!’
There in the middle of a public thoroughfare Al desperately tears off his jeans.
The culprit: a bull ant.
The little sod got me fourteen times on the upper thigh before I got my pants off.
I reckon these guys are so bad tempered she (the workers of these species are female) probably deliberately climbed all the way up my leg before letting me have it. I am sure she planned public humiliation in addition to the pain.
Anyway back to the main story.

I snapped a few shots of these gnarled roots in the heath. On the way home we stopped at Tarwin Lower near a Jetty on the wetlands.I snapped a few last piccies in the rapidly failing light because by then the moon was out.