Angophora Drive this morning

As we plodded back up Mt Angophora this morning what initially looked somewhat like a very scruffy, disabled dog wandered across the road in front of us.

 A closer image got it into the right family.

 It dodged around a little but then found a nice tree to climb.

 He (see below) didn't seem too fussed about my presence but just looked at me.

 An entry for the Crap Phone Koala Pics.

 Getting higher.

 On looking at the lower half of the beast it was clearly a male.

Horny moon and Venus

As we sit looking out at the Inlet in the evening we  are now seeing the "evening star" very dominant in the sky.  This is of course the planet Venus.

On the evening of 27 April it was joined by a crescent moon and a few nice pix resulted.

Magpie-lark migration

In commenting on my observation of a flock of 25 Magpie-larks at Mallacoota Rohan Clarke said "Magpie-larks are partial migrants.". Rohan followed up with comments about observing the species in the far NW "  ... we get them at Ashmore Reef in small numbers demonstrating migration to Timor."

This surprised me as I have never thought of them as migratory, so I have done a little delving into eBird and HANZAB.  

I started with two range maps from eBird (they are pretty consistent with the maps in the New Atlas of Australian Birds).  The various shades of mauve indicate relative abundance with a grey shade indicating the area was birded but the species no reported.  A white area was not visited in the season.

April - September

For some reason - possibly weather related -  many of the areas in the Great Victorian, Gibson and Great Sandy Deserts weren't visited in Summer!

October - March

It is difficult to pick out a clear pattern in these maps.

Sticking with eBird for a while, I looked at the data for East Gippsland Shire.  My first effort was to look at the total number of birds reported and the total number of data sheets on which the species was reported.

 At first glance the shape of the graphs (very similar with a correlation coefficient of 0.95) suggests a typical summer migrant pattern.  However that shape is also very similar to the chart of number of sheets submitted (correlation o.95) so the pattern possibly just reflects the number of boots on the ground (or at least bin's in the bush).  So I expressed the numbers as rates of the number of checklists submitted each month. 

The resulting graphs were not - to my mind - indicative of a typical migration pattern.

Fortunately HANZAB (vol 7A) resolves the issues. The key phrases are:

• Partly sedentary and resident , partly migratory  but varying geographically.
• In s. Aust adult breeding pairs sedentary ... while juveniles, immatures and non-breeding birds appear to form mobile (but probably resident) flocks
• Resident or sedentary in much of n. Aust. but seasonal migration to coastal and subcoastal n. Aust . in dry season.

I'm not sure how well that is reflected in the crude maps from eBird, but certainly explains the difference between East Gippsland data and Rohan's observations.

Red Sky in the morning ....

...  the shepherds will be getting a little worried on 26 April!  This series of photos actually begins with the final one I took (at 0640 at the top of the street) as it is the most lurid.  And I wanted it to be the image on a Facebook link!

 From our deck at 0635.

 A wider angle view shows the extent of the colour and the roiling grey clouds.

 I went to have a look out the front door and realised that most of the Eastern sky was orange, so hopped in the car and drove to the top of the street.

Then I took the opening shot.  By the time I got down to the house (~1 minute later) grey was name of the game!

Some waders

We - and quite a few other folk, but all socially distanced, - took an exercise walk along the beach at Bastion Point today.  Some birds gave a small amount of trouble in identification so were photographed to sort out later.

The first excitement were these two birds which were fairly bland, but after looking at Pizzey and Knight app in the field, and ABG at home, resolved happily to Red Knot.

 A Red-capped Plover for scaling purposes.

 Bar-tailed Godwits are still around (I recorded 17 in a number of groups) but the bill on this one was really lurid when first seen.  Almost like an Oystercatcher bill on a Godwit body.  Then it got the bill out of the water, we got closer, and everything was sorted.

 A ploverish looking bird was wandering the upper beach (away from the Inlet where there were quite a few small plovers.  Getting a good look at the photo it was clearly a Double-banded Plover.

All up I recorded 20 species of birds which isn't a bad haul. 

Powerlines track

This is a track that runs from the end of Karbeethong Rd uphill to the Miners Track beoming, at some point the Premier track which ends up near(ish) Gipsy Point Cemetery.  It is spectacular in Spring/Summer for the orchids that grow there.

Today was a tad dreary initially as we couldn't find any flowers or birds.  Indeed birds remained scarce with 2 Common Bronzewings the only offering.  Then we spotted a flowering Xanthorrhoea: I have always thought that all the local grass trees were X, resinosa but looking more closely I think this might be X. minor lutea which is also found in this area.

The map from Flora of Victoria:

 Here is the entire plant.

 The way the leaves emerge at ground level suggest X. minor rather than the trunks of X. resinosa

Not prolific, but it was flowering!

I went back on 24 April and found another x minor that had flowered recently and apperaed to heave set seed.

There were quite a few Scaevola ramosissima.

 A solitary specimen of Lomatia ilicifolia will be photographed again when the flowers are more fully out.

A better image of the flowers from the next day.

There were a lot of Hybanthus vernonii flowers but for some reason my photos were rubbish so I won't bother your download limit with them.  This one from the next day is a bit better!

Quarry Beach

The day's second exercise walk was to Quarry Beach.  An interesting sighting was an Eastern Reef Egret working from a rock in the wash zone.

 A little further down the beach the resident flock of Australian Pied Oystercatchers has grown to 11 birds including at least 2 flagged birds and Stumpy.  The last mentioned is so called as it has lost both feet: apart from a tendency to sink into the sand it seems to be going OK.  I could only fit 10 of the them into the frame.

We have been a little intrigued why they seem to be feeding high up the beach rather than on the worms and shellfish at the water's edge.  The species account in HANZAB appears to confirm that feeding is most commonly in the wash zone.

Moving down the beach there were 7 Great Cormorants on the usual rock towards the Secret Beach end.  Here is one of them, plus evidence of others.

 plus one Little Pied Cormorant.

 A lot of kelp had been washed up, but surprisingly little else of interest.

There were quite a few tracks on the beach   I suspect - from the lack of web - the bird prints are most likely Ravens.  The little dots are intriguing: I first thought crabs, but they would leave pairs of track lines.  My next thought is some form of gastropod although I cant quick work out how the dots are made.

Shorebirds and their habitat

We have been doing other things recently so hadn't done an exercise walk for a while.  We decided that a walk on Bastion Beach was the go, with light weights (bins and camera) as the heavey weights (telescope and tripod) slow me down too much.

The first image follows from comments that the reduced number of Black Swans on the Inlet is due to sand having killed off all the Eel Grass.  Judging by the amount washing up along the Inlet the grass is regrowing.  Can we expect to see a flock of 3,000 Black Swans sometime soon?

 This is very close to where the last opening was formed.  It seems to be a popular habitat for White-fronted Chats

 We only saw 2 on this expedition (after a flock of 31 last visit) but at least I was able to get a snap of this male from about 40m away.

 One of about 30 (can't be fussed referring back to get the exact number) of Red-capped Plovers,

 Not nesting, just hanging out.

 A Double-banded Plover.  Some of them are beginning to show the bands, but not the really colourful ones yet. That happens in July.

 One of a small number of Red-necked Stints.  I had hoped that they, and the Bar-tailed Godwits might be moving onto breeding plumage before heading to Siberia.

 These blobs are Moon Snail egg masses.  There were at least 100 washed up in a small area.

We only recorded 13 species - which surprised me as they seemed quite numerous.

Expected and actual weather

This is a somewhat odd post and is pretty much me trying to understand part of what I have observed with the weather.  If fiddling with numbers is not your thing, I suggest you close this post now!

Plain explanation of what has been seen.

The post covers some playing with current maximum and minimum temperatures and the averages of those attributes for the previous 27 years for each day.  The detail of that follows.  However what I realised was that there was a fair degree (r = 0.71) of correlation between the 2 values.   In essence when the minimum is high so is the maximum.

In this area frontal activity is usually a cold front so it should not be very unusual to get an above average minimum followed by a below average maximum.  However a warm front is most unusual  so getting a below average minimum followed by an above average maximum would be unexpected.

That leads to the following situation

% of observations
	min above	min below
max above	27	18
max below	24	31

In future months I shall use those proportions, applied to the total number of days in the month, to assess the pattern for the month.

Detail and Methods

It arose as a result of my calculating the temperature anomaly for each month.  That is the difference between the current value of a variable and the long term average of that variable.   Thus for March 2020 the average temperature for the month was was 18.34^oC while the long term average temperature for April is 18.44 so the month was very slightly below average temperature.

In compiling those averages I have listed the actual minimum and maximum temperatures for the day and calculated the average temperatures for that day (all data being that collected by the Bureau of Meteorology - BoM).  In August 2019 I started coding these data according to whether the minimum and maximum were above or below average.  That gave a table such as this (for March 2020):

	min above	min below	Total
max above	10	1	11
max below	8	12	20
Total	18	13

I started to wonder if this distribution was different to "normal" which immediately suggested a Chi-square test.  To do that I needed a set of expected values and set them as 7.75 for each cell (adding to 31) which I felt would be an approximation to normal.  The resultant values of Chi square were significantly different to 0 in each month.  The March 2020 result gives a probability of the value of Chi square calculated by EXCEL being due to chance of 0.002 .  That is a high likelihood the data is different to assumed equal distribution.

However it seemed that every month the low achiever was the minimum below, maximum above cell suggesting that the assumption of equality was not sound.  So I calculated the actual table for the 7 months for which I have data (January was not available as the BoM site was not working for several days due to power problems after the fire).  That gave a table 

	min above	min below
max above	57	38
max below	52	66

The low value for the cell of interest is very obvious.  It is significantly different to both of the cells showing the extremes moving in the same direction.  Overall, when compared to a table with equal cells, this table is very close having a value of Chi square significant at the 5% probability.

My next step was to create an expected table with the same proportions in each cell (but with a total for the table of 31) and then calculating the values of Chi square for each month.  The results of that exercise follow: I compared what the analysis seemed to show against the monthly reports and they were (fortunately) quite compatible.

1. August 2019:  Chi square significant at 2% level.   This was mainly due to a high proportion of maxima below normal.
2. September 2019: Chi square significant at 10% level.   Not a strong signal and difference was mainly due to a high proportion of minima below normal.
3. October 2019 Chi square significant at 10% level.   Not a strong signal and difference was mainly due to a high proportion of minima below normal.
4. November 2019: Chi square not significant at 10% level.   A little surprising as most minima below average.
5. December 2019 Chi square significant at 0.01% level.   This was mainly due to a very high proportion (17/31) of results with both maximum and minimum above normal.
6. January 2020:  no analysis - see above.
7. February 2020: Chi square significant at 1% level.   The pattern was closer to average but with cooler days and warmer nights, possibly reflecting a lot of cloud.
8. March 2020: Chi square significant at 5% level.   The pattern was closer to average but with cooler days and warmer nights

A walk on an un-named track!

On the afternoon of 14 April we exercised along a little used track off Betka Rd.  It starts just below the road to the tip and emerges opposite the road in to Davis Beach Car Park.  The approximate route is here:

We had done this walk once before - pre-fire - with the Wednesday Walkers and were interested to see how it had fared.  On the previous foray there were a few fallen trees and there were a few more since, and probably as a result of, the fire.   None of them presented any danger nor insuperable obstacles.

A few flowers were evident including a couple of rather decrepid specimens of Schelhammera undulata which I didn't photograph as better specimens would be later in the walk.  Needless to say there weren't!  Here is a Brachyscome spathulata.

 Craspedia variabilis - aka Billy Buttons.

 There was quite a lot of Maidenhair Ferns in some places.

 The second part of the track paralleled a creek line where the Cyathea australis are regrowing very nicely.

 From the page for this species in Flora of Victoria I saw a synonym of Pteridophyta Dominica  mentioning the Australian Plant Names Index (APNI).  On checking APNI I was relieved to see that  Cyathea australia is still the official name.  In fact there are quite a few sysnonyms that have been attempted from time to time!

Quite soon after getting to this part of the walk Frances was walking about 3 metres in front of me, so didn't see the 1.8m long Red-bellied Black Snake which shot across thre track between us.  I suspect it had been exploring a fallen branch, was disturbed by here passage and bolted to its hollow in a burnt out stump.  It looked well fed and was certainly moving well.

There was quite a lot of this white 'stuff' around on the ground.  I am assuming it is a slime mould.

 On the subject of slime, we found some extra evidence thereof .  I feel that is a fair descriptions of the life forms who dumped a load of cans in the bush.  Probably the same idiots who dumped some prunings there.  Can't these bogans work out when the tip is open?