Home and (a little way) away.

 On the last morning of 2020 (the worst year I can remember - so far, 2021 looks to be offering some competition) some of the local New Holland Honeyeaters visited flowers in our garden.  Each one was peered at closely to make sure it wasn't a White-cheeked Honeyeater.

The first image features a garlic flower!  Taken through 3 sheets of glass.

Visiting a Canna and trying to imitate a Hummingbird.

In the afternoon we visited Quarry Beach, close to low tide.  Despite the tide not being really low (0.2m rather than 0.02m) the beach was very wide and lots of rock exposed.  A colourful crab - or as we saw on an exhibit card in the Dar es Salaam Museum 'crap' - was hiding in a crevice.

In the Eastern part of the beach the exposed rocks were hosting many mussel shells.  Doing a very rough calculation from counting a sample of the shells in this image I think it shows about 1200 mussels.  Taking a couple of rough guesses that this was 1 of 10 colonies on this rock, and there were about 20 similarly sized rocks in this part of the beach gives about 2,400,000 mussels!

Not so plentiful but in crevices at the Western end of the beach were lots of Turban shells.

And a few Seastars, of various colours.

The tide was out so far that some of the bull kelp was visible.

At the West end a lot of Chitons were sucked on to rocks.  This was one of the biggest.

Also a Triton.

The west end of Quarry beach.

Looking East from Secret Beach.

Secret Beach wasn't so secret!

A good map of the area at the Quarry Beach carpark.

On the way home we called in at the Davis Beach car park to see if any of the Solanum aviculare fruit had turned colour yet.  (We expected them to go go tomato colour - which seems to be supported by the images and text in Flora of Victoria.)  However most of them were still green ...

.. and where the empty receptacles indicated the fruit had ripened and fallen off ....

... the fallen fruit just looked brown and/or manky.