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Literally A Person posted:Good thread. Nice animals. You refer, of course, to Horace?
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Feb 20, 2024 23:24
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| # ? May 1, 2024 23:47 |
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down1nit posted:Ahhhh that's the stuff! I've always loved how absolutely imposing a eucalyptus could be. I've never seen bark like that on one. Smooth? Sure. Paper sheets? Yeah, why not. This looks like some random impressive pine. The mistletoe are native; their berries are an important part of the food web here. Mistletoebirds for instance live almost exclusively off them (best picture I could get sorry, they are very timid). Often the mistletoe will die before the host plant and drop off, becoming a nice microhabitat for lichens.   Anyway, the forest is more a patchwork of thousands of little house-sized micro-forests, often with weirdly sharp dividing lines between the different biomes. Here's more of what I call the "dry ironbark" forest, with very little in the way of understorey, and a sprinkling of pines thrown in. The latter tends to grow to a certain height, at which point their weight exceeds what the thin soils can support, and they inevitably tip over en mass when a storm rolls through. These "dry ironbark" sections aren't the nicest to look at, but they are super easy to walk through, and easy to spot birds in. Mammals like it too- at the base of the tree you can see where kangaroos have been "dust bathing"; I suspect the eucalyptus-oil-infused leaf litter is great for controlling parasites. The second picture is the very common sight of an ironbark stump well on the way to becoming a termite mound, with the surrounding ground still very bare owing to the activity of the termites and the general nastiness of eucalyptus oils.   But in other parts of the forest, generally where the soil is less thin, other plants can survive and the ironbarks become just one part of an assemblage of plant species. These two photos are a pretty good illustration of this: as ironbark numbers go down, general species diversity and thickness of ground cover go up. I am trying to devise a field study to work out which way the cause and effect swings here! The second picture represents the peak of what ironbark forests can offer: the highest density of bird species (if I start posting birb photos I will not stop, my species count for this region sits at 90), the most variety of flowers, large numbers of carnivorous plants, and the whole place just smells incredible. Seriously. That said it is REALLY HARD TO WALK THROUGH.   And finally, some of the more interesting residents: the grass trees. They are really really weird plants that grow at an inch a year. When you see them out the corner of your eye, they have the right silhouette and size to register in your brain as "person;" they have real personality, in a Dr Suess kind of way. These ones aren't particularly big, but they were in the right sunlight for a shot.  Some utterly useless waste of a human being dumped a trailer load of rubbish right next to a two-century-old ring of grass trees last year, and despite being generally a pretty normal person, I still felt compelled to apologise to the grass trees when I saw it.... Tree Bucket fucked around with this message at 04:34 on Feb 21, 2024 |
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Feb 21, 2024 04:17
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This thread is 
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Feb 21, 2024 05:00
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Tree Bucket posted:(if I start posting birb photos I will not stop, my species count for this region sits at 90) 
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Feb 21, 2024 05:48
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down1nit posted:Haha. I love it. Just a big ol fatty. Ironbark?  I love Ironbark, although Red Gum, Spotted Gum, Bloodwood, and Blackbutt burn nicely too.
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Feb 21, 2024 06:01
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| # ? May 1, 2024 23:47 |
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Today I photographed the world's angriest treecreeper:
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Feb 27, 2024 11:52
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