Friday, 29 September 2023

Scenes of the Mouth and Ocean

The first three photographs were taken at Captain Stevenson's Point on 28 September and show the extent of sand exposed at low tide.



The next image is 29 September, also at low tide, taken from the steps at Bastion Point.  There is not much depth of water there!
We went to search the rocks for interesting things.  Lots of seaweed of various colours (Frances has read that the red, brown and green weeds are actually different phyla) and mussels.  Not much else.

The first clump of Sea Hare eggs we have seen in quite a while.
A Black-faced Cormorant setting on one of the light poles,
The rest of the photos are a series I took of a bold parasailer out in the ocean.  When first spotted he was quite a distance out from shore and several kilometres down the beach.  He'd got closer by the first image.


Oops.


The red arrows show this was not crying wolf!
The accumulated views on iNaturalist (ie everyone except me) reckon this is a Tiger Snake rather than an Eastern Brown Snake.  I have asked them why this is so.
And I got a very detailed and helpful answer:
"Tigers have a more robust , wide head and overall stockier build than EBs, EBs have a smaller finer head that narrows towards the nose and overall look more rope-like. As for the colour, both Tigers and EBs are very variable, but this one has an olive tinge with a contrasting underside of yellow-olive that's Tiger. Also the scales appear a little larger and more 'coarse' than in EBs"


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