Botany Bay National Park - La Perouse

There you go! After having traveled nearly 1000km down south and back, visited two national parks and used 4 days doing it without seeing a single new bird, you drive 10 minuets down the coast for a little stroll in the park and an Australian Hobby suddenly leisurely glides by :-) The picture is nothing to cheer about, but sufficiently good for ID.

We had decided to do a little walk around the headland, a great way to spend a few hours here in Sydney. The walk covers a good selection of habitats and it is always nice to hit a bit of sea breeze.

It looked like all the good predators were out showing their feathers this late January weekend. We noticed a predator being harassed by a gang of ravens, typical for a juveniles not knowing how to avoid trouble in the world. Being a bit shell shocked after having been picked upon by 3 grown up ravens, the juvenile Peregrine Falcon was happy to have found a quiet spot and was not keen to get back on the wings again, allowing us to get a good close look.

Despite all the ranting about how fantastic macro lenses are, I must admit I had only brought the Bigma for this walk, sometimes it is just not convenient to changes lenses in the bush and the bird-in-flight pictures could not been done with the macro, the Hobby was simply too far away. However, even a old, heavy, light hungry super zoom can be fired up for a bit of close up action ;-)

Happy about the picture above, pretty sharp! Handheld, 1/250s at 320mm (480mm full frame equivalent), cropped a bit, but otherwise straight from camera.
Great walking close to home and realizing that the local bush also can deliver and that you do not always have to travel to where the grass is greener to see something new.

Ben Boyd and Kosciuzko NP Long Weekend Road Trip Coming to An End

There you go! No more blog posts about Ben Boyd or Kosciuszko National Parks for a while at least. Fantastic road trip! Amazing how much of Australia you can cover over a long (4 days) weekend and equally amazing how fast the landscape changes when traveling. From the scrubby coastal heath, through dense dark rain forest to treeless alpine regions in a day!

We saw next to no new birds, but we saw so much other stuff that it is hard to be disappointed. It totally makes sense visiting either one of the southern coastal parks or a "cold" alpine park during Australian summer. The fact that both of the parks are located only a "short" half day drive from Sydney makes the trip we did very doable in 4 days and we did not have the feeling of having to drive all the time. Choosing only one of the parks it should indeed be possible to do in a normal weekend.

As usual I have made a Picasa album with the best pictures from the trip, some have already been used in the blog post, but there are a few more you can access by following the link below. This holiday was the first time I really started using my new macro lens and it was super exciting shooting with such a type of lens. I am amazed how versatile it is. Obviously it shines doing macro photography, but the night shooting capabilities and the fact that I more or less could use it as a walk-around lens were pleasant surprises.
Macro photography is not expensive at all! An old manual focus lens will be fine, set the lens to 1:1 i.e. its closest focusing distance and obtain focus by leaning forward and backwards. Most macro lenses are super sharp and even if you are a fanboy that gets shivers when thinking of putting a 3rd party lens on your camera, I can calm you down by telling that I have seen old manual micro (that is macro in Nikon language) Nikkor lenses selling at less than $25 on ebay.

Kosciuszko National Park

Mount Kosciuszko - Summit day!

Conquering Mount Kasciuszko, the highest pinnacle of mainland Australia, on Australia day! How much more Australian can it get? :-) As mentioned in the previous post we set out on our endeavor very early in the morning, to be able to make it back to Sydney before night fall. In reality we had heaps of time, since the climb is indeed quite gentle and can be done easily as a half day walk.


Crossing the Snowy river once again, we took the time to examine the crystal clear water and managed to spot a bit of underwater wildlife. The fishes of the alpine region of Kosciuszko have a very interesting story. Being a fish high up on a mountain does obviously have its difficulties, since water, as I am sure you readers are aware of, runs down when given a chance. So as a fish you either have to use enormous amounts of energy "staying high" or find steady water - like Blue Lake - and stay there at the cost of isolating yourself in a restricted area.

Indeed Blue Lake holds an endemic subspecies of the Galaxias family, obviously in close family to the small Galaxias sp. of the snowy river - like the one in the picture above - it has been isolated long enough to become a species of its own. In fact, if you "dive" into the literature you realize that the parting of water in the Kosciuszko National Park has lead to a number of fish subspecies each filling their own little niche of habitat. Exciting stuff!

With all that excitement going on around us it took a while to make it to the summit, but we finally found ourselves at the target of our walk, 2228m above sea level, Mount Kosciuszko! When coming from Charlotte Pass the "peak" looks quite flat and boring, but standing on the top you have some very impressive views.

Walking in the Kosciuszko National Park during Australian summer is absolutely fantastic, nowhere else in Australia (except maybe for Tasmania) can you do some serious hiking this time of year without having to bring your own body-weight in drinking water. The morning walk to the top had near perfect temperature and standing admiring the views was nearly a bit chill - very nice indeed!

Realizing that the ascent had taken slightly longer than expected we cranked up the speed a bit and pushed rapidly down the mountain. Guess we were all ready to get back to Sydney, there is something about coming home that is nearly as good as being on the move .. and I was super excited about getting the pictures onto the computer.

Again it was astonishing seeing the variation and quantity of the wildflowers along the path, during the ascent you noticed how a type of plants start being more common and then slowly disappears again as you go higher, each species having its own optimum micro habitat.


I really would have liked not having to name those grasshoppers, but since they are here on the blog I should at least give a qualified(?) guess. The one above gave me a hard time and only after realizing that the red dots are not a part of the grasshoppers natural coloration it started working out. After looking into a bit of grasshopper literature I found a Monistria sp. that looked quite similar and then it did not take long to find the Spotted Mountain Grasshopper Monistria concinna .. It should have been easy; it is spotted and we saw it while bushwalking in the mountains! :-) Best guess for the grasshopper in the picture below is probably an Yellow winged locust Gastrimargus musicus, you may argue that the wings are not yellow (I can reveal that I had the same thought), but apparently they are when unfolded! - see here :-) .. however, as always any suggestions are very welcome.

Night In Kosciuszko National Park

As soon as darkness fell, the possums and gliders were on the move, fantastic stuff! Once again we had a possums walking straight through our camp and a glider sitting in one of the campsite trees less than 10 meters from our tents.

It is a glider in the forth picture, diagnostic features are the skin fold up around the front legs and (apparently) the white tip of the tail. The excess skin is what allow these nocturnal creatures to avoid having to walk on the ground during night, but instead fly -or glide - between trees by transforming themselves into a flat, thin and lightweight wing.

One of the reasons for buying a longer macro lens i.e. 150mm was that it would double as a fast semi-long lens that could relieve the bigma under difficult lighting conditions, where light gathering properties become more important than reach; such as in a dark rain forest or while doing night spotlighting in the Kosciuszko!

A fast lens, like the f/2.8 macro, needs much less light to autofocus simply because it allows more light to flow through the lens, giving the autofocus module more contrast to work with. Together with the D300's excellent auto focus capabilities and build in flash it means that you (with a bit of luck) and help from a skilled spotlighting team mate can get auto focus on the various nocturnal critters even during the darkest dark of nights and get usable pictures.

The nocturnal mammals are obviously great targets for some night photography, indeed they are not as rare as one would think, they simply hide really well during daylight hours when us humans are more likely to walk around in their habitat. However, I might actually prefer all the crawly stuff that comes out when it gets dark. The weirdest bugs and spiders are everywhere if you look for it and as subjects they show quite a bit more patience with the slowness of your photographic skills - it simply takes them longer to run away.

Great stuff and we could happily go to bed dreaming about bugs and spiders - not bad at all :-D At about 3.30am we were woken by what we probably all had secretly hoped would happen; the call of a nearby owl! Poking little G. was at first not very successful, but after a few pokes contact was established and risk-benefit negotiations were initiated: Risk - we have seen it before or it would fly away before we got out. Benefit - seeing an owl, what more can you hope for?

In the midst of all this we suddenly heard the sound of a tent door zip being opened and we knew that the hunt was on! First guess was that the owl-spotting-machine Adelle had convinced Jarrod to get his lazy arse out of bed to join for some spotlighting, so we were a bit surprised to find Jarrod alone - Adelle's long proven success with owls had probably made her estimate that it was very unlikely she would gain a new tick and hence she had valued sleep higher than a nightly excursion into the dark :-D We got great views and pictures of a large Tawny Frogmouth probably sitting wondering why people were running around below it. In the end it had had enough of all the shenanigans and flew off and we could get back into bed.

An early start to the day proved that early mornings can be as good as late evenings, when it comes to spotting exciting wildlife. The Pseudoscorpion above was a very surprising early morning visitor, I have never seen the kind before. Despite its dramatic looks and venomous pincers it is not dangerous to humans - good to know! Guess the pseudo- part of the name comes from the fact that it misses the stinging tail that you normally associate with proper scorpions. As you might have noticed I have linked quite heavily to the lifeunseen.com web-page in these Kosciuszko blog posts. I am very impressed with the quality of the site and the fact that it combines great pictures with heaps of information about the insects - good work!

The spider below had taken full advantage of the human presence at the campsite and made its fantastic web inside the toilet block, probably taking advantage of insects being attracted by the higher humidity. It is obviously from the master weaver group, I have tried including the outline of the circular web - notice the two thicker "spokes" used to enhance the strength of the web. The spokes system does apparently go under the name stabilamentum and can vary from quite simple, like in my picture, to creation of art! See more examples here.

All good stuff! However, we had to get going, this 2010 Australia day was going to be a busy one, not only did we have to make our way back to Sydney, but we had planned to conquer the highest peak of the continent before leaving - Mount Kosciuszko - Summit day! ;-)

Kosciuszko National Park - Camping at Sawpit Creek

We are getting soft - really soft! The choice of campsite was a victory for an abundance of luxury. Instead of the good old pit toilet, we ended up with proper ones, add to that hot water, even hot showers and to make it almost ridiculous, we ended up having access to washing machines! :-D So needless to say that the Sawpit Creek campsite was a huge success.

After a long day of driving followed by some hard walking - and it was really quite hard lugging 4kg of camera equipment around in the alpine countryside - we could probably all need a bit of feeling clean. The campsite was indeed quite fantastic, while the day was slowly coming to an end, things started happening around us. A couple of residing kangaroos came in close to investigate what dinner plans we had and a couple of fast moving Treecreapers had us fired up, however, the flash of red came from a spot behind the eye - not above! Making them juvenile White-throated TCs .. i.e. I still miss the Red-browed Treecreaper.

I think, I have always been quite alert to the various types of insects around down here in Australia - as a tourist arriving you often are, since you have heard all the stories about deadly spiders and other nasty critters. But that alertness has probably been pumped just a notch by investing in a macro lens. Extra alertness or not, I do not think I have ever seen as many interesting bugs crawling around in our vicinity and that was even before it got dark!


Highlight of the bright hours was probably our little green friend below. Measuring in at somewhere around 15cm it was quite a lot of insect. It is not a Praying Mantids, since it misses the heavily spined raptorial front legs, thanks to Jarrod for pointing that out :-) I think the call was "stick insect" from the Phasmatodea group.

All good! A truckload of campsite coziness, good (spicy) dinner in the pots, excellent company and some exciting Australian wildlife, what more can you hope for? Except maybe for a seriously butt kicking world class sunset?

Those last hours before the sun goes down are some of the best time you have when camping, all the running around and seeing stuff during the day is over and you can finally allow yourself to just sit there and relax. Looking at the pictures above and below makes me want to go again! :-) This night in Kosciuszko we had planned to delay our sleep and instead use some time equipped with spotlight and camera and see what types of wildlife would be around.

To be continued ..

Kosciuszko National Park - A "Closer" Look At Day One

After the fantastic, but bird-less, days in Ben boyd National Park I can nearly feel how my readers are lusting for a few good bird stories :-D I have to be honest straight away and say that the alpine part of Kosciuszko National Park delivered exceptionally few birds, of which most where Australian Pipets. However, when you go to a habitat so dramatically different you are going to see new and exciting stuff and we had unknowingly picked the absolutely perfect time of year for a magnificent display of wildflowers galore!

Overlooking the landscape you straight away know that a place like that is not going to sustain much wildlife. Nowhere to hide and nothing eat! It is not entirely true, the alpine region is home to a few types of birds and one type of marsupial, the critically endangered Mountain Pygmy-possum, however, it sleeps 7 months a year :-) The lack of larger wildlife means that smaller creatures can roam - and hence a fantastic symbiosis between insects and wildflowers can blossom!

First time ever during day light hours I actually realized that the 150mm macro was the choice of the day rather than logging around the Bigma. There were simply too much exciting small stuff that needed to be digitalized and little G. was handling the point and shoot just fine, producing most of the landscape shots you saw in the previous blog post.

Once again, I have to admit that I do not have the appropriate knowledge or literature to give a thorough and convincing description of what species we actually managed to see. However, with some help from the internet in combination with a bit of guessing I should be able to name at least a few of the flowers in this blog post. Starting out, I am quite confident in naming the large orange pom-pom in the first picture as a Billy Button or Craspedia.

The orchid in picture three looks very much like one of the Leek Orchids, Prasophyllum sp., after a bit of searching around trying to determine more accurately which one, I realized that apparently there are 126 species so I will leave that task till later ;-) .. Actually just as I had given up after looking at all the well-known(?) Prasophyllums I found the best fit so far: Mauve Leek-Orchid, Prasophyllum alpestre - still all suggestions are welcome.

The strange looking flower below seems to fit the description of a bidgee widgee Acaena novae-zelandiae. According to a comment I found on the internet, this flower is quite famous in Australia (guess that must be in the flower community?) as the first weed Australia managed to export to the rest of the world - pay back time!! :-D

The Royal Bluebells in the picture below is indeed the flower chosen for the Floral Emblem of the Australian Capital Territory (ACT). There you go! :-)

All this flower stuff is quite interesting if you have a bit of time to kill and the internet is a fantastic resource. While searching around I found this google book, which at least title wise seems to be spot on. Probably a task I will leave to later as well, but please let me know if it is good. :-)