Western heath and forest

On the afternoon of 9 June we went to a track in the forest to the NW of the town. basically between the power lines and Watertrust Rd.  As the track comes out (after merging with another) at the Waste Water Treatment Plant I call it Poopits Track 2 (it's dotted in red).  The one it merges with is Poopits Rd 1 (green dots)!

The first half of Poopits track 2 is through a heathy area (lots of Xanthorrhea and Banksia serrata) while the second half is more Eucalypt woodland.

One of our aims for this walk was to look for any Winter orchids (following from finding the Cobra Greenhoods on Saturday).  We dipped on that target.  A nice early sighting was some Leucopogon coming in to flower.  I suspect it is L. virgatus.

White is a popular colour!  This is Hakea decurrens.

The ID was confirmed by these nuts: the two small 'horns' are definitive.

We found a small number of beans in flower.  Our book wasn't a great deal of help so I went for the members of the Fabaceae listed on the Atlas of Living Australia for this area.  There are 57 of them and none match the images generated by Googling at all closely!

I have decided this is a yellow flower!  Im not game so far to even guess Family!

Not a great image, but I am quite confident this is Acacia genistifolia.  The plant was much more vigorous than the miserable little specimens we used to see at Carwoola.

A white flower!

There were a lot of white and pink Epacris impressa, but few red ones.  I have no idea why the colours vary so much.

Our local orchid books refers to several species growing under Banksia serrata,  There were a good number of them in the heath but no orchids underneath (that we could see).  This was a particularly fine cone.

I went back on my bike ride on Monday (to get a better photo of the Leucopogon) and coming back along Karbeethong road spotted a nice clump of Ramaria sp.  This shot shows the stipes ...

.. while this is a close up of the 'cauliflower' heads!

I'm finishing off with a couple of sunny snaps (rather than do a special post for them.  On the Sunday evening the rays from the setting were interesting ....

.. while the sunrise on Monday was spectacular!