More bird diet and more orchids

My bike outing on the morning of 19 August was to try to locate some Glossy Black-Cockatoos seen feeding in Mortimer's Paddock.  I quickly found samples of their desired food: Allocasuarina littoralis cones

But the Glossies were absent.  A flock of 27 Yellow-tailed Blacks flew over, and there was considerable evidence of Glossy chewing under the appropriate tree.  So, close but no cheroot!

On our regular morning walk to the lagoon I have been seeing Martins mixed in with the horde of Swallows hawking over the marsh by Fisheries Jetty.  My default Martin is the Tree Martin but I had thought that I had seen, without binoculars,  red on the forehead of one bird.  So I paused to check.  The swooping birds were all moving quickly, as is usually the case with hirundines, but this bunch perched and reinstated the default option.

I did a couple of laps of Mortimer's Paddock 

... looking for the Glossies with no luck but any outing which includes a Bassian Thrush has to be rated a success.  This one was showing it was an early bird.

Heading back towards home the paddock behind the Lagoon was very soggy following the weekend rain.    This had attracted some Ibis and Spoonbills (and, out of image, a pair of Australian Pied Oystercatchers) to create fear and loathing among the frog population.

There was an amount of flowering going on.  Clematis aristata ...

.. Acacia longifolia ...

.. Pittosporum revolutum ...

... and Pandorea pandorana.

One assumes that this is a result of the warm weather of the last few days and the preceding rain.  That made me think of visiting the powerlines West of town to see what was occurring.  "The books" often say that Prasophyllum sp. (Leek Orchids) in particular flower well after fire so that was our target genus.  It was raining at the start so I didn't want to have camera out too long so some of these snaps are pretty appalling.

As we walked up the easement I was astonished to find an advanced bud of Thelymitra sp.  

Eventually we found at least 10 buds.  They are several days off flowering but are surely going to be a few weeks in front of "late September" which is given as the flowering time for nearly all species of Sun Orchid.

We did notice a low forest of Caladenia catenata: at least 100s of plants.

Then we hit a patch of "Prasos" which I believe the ##@@^&^&^%^% ing taxonomists are trying to change to Paraprasophyllum or some such rubbish.  It is a real worry when vernacular names are nmore stable, and thus more useful, than the scientific names.

A more or less in-focus close up.

Showing the emergence from the leaf.

A much greener looking species.

A green double-header!

Definitely an area which needs monitoring.