We had a new arrival. Bertie the Miniature Bull Terrier traveled all the way from far off Queensland to us in York, Western Australia.
A Little Surprise
Bull Terrier
She’s Gone
It only seems like yesterday when I blogged about the arrival of Frida into our lives, and now 13years later I’m writing that she has passed away.
It has been an incredibly strange few days with no Frida. While she wasn’t a noisy dog the house seems so quiet now. I didn’t realise how much of a presence she was in our lives. If you went to the washing line she went with you. Every time I cooked she was sitting beside me. She’d follow us into the bathroom and wait while we showered. Now that constant presence has gone and the silence is deafening.
These videos are how I like to remember her.
Oh Happy Day!!!!!
Bit of an odd morning today. It was a distinctly grey day and I wasn’t intending to take any photos. While getting set to take the dog out for a walk along the river at Blandstown the Beloved Significant Other said she was taking her binoculars to look for birds. I thought about taking mine but when I saw that they were in a pouch with my camera I just grabbed the whole shebang.
When we got there I wasn’t sure whether Frida – our dog – would walk. She is very old now and has to all intents and purposes given up on walking. She loves a ride in the car, but you can’t guarantee that she’ll get get out for a walk. With a bit of assistance she got out and was quite happy to head towards the river. When she was young long grass would send her silly and she would madly runabout causing mayhem. At 13 with arthritis in one of her back legs and kidney problems it doesn’t happen very often anymore but all that long grass along the river and she was off!
While trying to avoid being bowled over by a deranged bull terrier the Beloved Significant Other said she thought she could see a Rainbow Bee-eater. Oh how I scoffed. “Impossible” said I. “They don’t arrive back from Northern Australia and Papua New Guinea until November.” I added being all ‘knowledgeable’. But when I raised the camera up and looked there was a female Rainbow Bee-eater, and listening very carefully I could just make out the chirping call of another. Never had I seen one this early in York before. I’d read that in some areas of southern Australia the winters are becoming much milder and some of the birds aren’t migrating north in autumn. Whether that applied to these birds I don’t know.
So as we headed home I couldn’t work out what had made me the happier. The fact that Frida had just had a bully run or that I’d seen the Rainbow Bee-eater. Probably both. Oh! I did photograph some other birds. Here they are below.
Off Course
This autumn and winter we’ve been spending quite a bit of time at the local golf course – not playing golf at all but walking in the woods at the back of the course. It is a fantastic piece of Wandoo forest with rocky out crops and steep gullies cut by water erosion. In fact that’s probably why it still exists as the land wouldn’t be fit for any commercial purpose. For us it is a wonderful place where we can walk the dog and view native flora and fauna. The other great thing is other than seeing the occasional golfer on the fairways as we drive in there is nobody around.
Frida our wayward and reluctant Bull Terrier loves it. There are rocky outcrops to stand on and strike a heroic pose, holes to look down and lots and lots of interesting things to smell. It is the one place where she enthusiastically jumps out of the car rather than having to be enticed out with bribes.
Me I go there to photograph flowers and animals and just generally get away from everything. I find it so peaceful and relaxing. Here are a selection of photos I’ve taken this winter.
The early morning sun highlights the golden web of the Golden Orb Weaving Spider.
Green-veined Shell Orchid, Pterostylis scabra, growing just off the fairway in the rough.
You never know who you’ll meet in the rough. Female western grey kangaroo aka sooty kangaroo (Macropus fuliginosus).
Fringed Mantis Orchid, or Green Spider Orchid, (Caladenia falcata).
Cowslip Orchid, Caladenia flava subs. flava.
Hundreds of Sugar Orchids, Ericksonella saccharata, can be seen growing in the bark and leaf litter beneath the wandoo trees.
Winter donkey orchid, Diuris brumalis.
Chapman’s Spider Orchid, Caladenia chapmanii.
A quick bite to eat.
From this …
This is the natural state of the English Bull Terrier. Most people have this image of them being highly aggressive canine fighting machines, but the reality is that they prefer comfortable beds, cuddling up to blankets or preferably people, and sleeping.
…to this
Every now and then something miraculous happens and the Bull Terrier will erupt into a highly excited state where it runs at full tilt round and round. Heaven help anyone who gets in the way as its like being hit by a fury anti-tank missile. This is known as the “bully run“. It usually lasts about 2 minutes then the normal state is resumed.
Tyger Tyger, burning bright…
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
William Blake 1794 from “Songs of Experience“
William Blake when he wrote his famous poem was thinking of the Bengal Tiger. We have/had tigers in Australia. Well kind of – hmmmm not really. The Tasmanian tiger or to give it its proper name the thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) once roamed all over Australia. But by the time the island continent was colonised it was restricted to the rain forests of Tasmania. I wrote a blog post about them a while ago. The thylacine is a tourist draw card in Tassie and it has become an icon for the tourist industry, but they don’t have a monopoly on it. Down in the South West corner of Western Australia, in the Blackwood Valley is the sleepy town of Nannup. Many of the locals are convinced that the Thylacine roams the forests in the valley and consequently it is now part of Nannup’s tourism campaign.
As it would happen we found ourselves in Nannup the other week. We weren’t looking for the tiger, but we certainly found them as we walked up and down the main street. Again like in Tassie the thylacine has been “gnomified” and can be found in front gardens all over the shop.
It’s not the first time we’d visited the town, but we’d not been for a while and it had changed quite a bit. With the winding down of the forestry industry Nannup is seriously chasing the tourist dollar and the place has been titivated to reflect that. Once you were hard pushed to get a decent coffee now it seems that every other building is a cafe. It presents as a nice up beat place with a friendly vibe.
Our accommodation was ideally located in the forest and only a stone’s throw from Kondil Wildflower Park. The park consists of new growth forest which contains an incredible diversity of flora. There are three walking trails within the park and I walked two of them. The Woody Pear Walk which is a 1 Km easy walk trail and the the Wildflower Wander which according to the information board is 3.5 Km but according to my GPS is 4.9 Km – either way it’s an easy walk on well sign posted trails.
Below are some of the orchids I found while walking around.
Magical Magic Lake
This could have been titled Hyden – the return. Hyden is a small town in the middle of the Wheatbelt in Western Australia some 292Km east of Perth. Regular readers will remember that we’ve been before and maybe somewhat perplexed as to why we’d bother to visit again. Well Hyden’s claim to fame is Wave Rock which is a large granite rock face that has been eroded in the shape of a perfect breaking wave. More than 100,000 tourists make their way there very year. Most just stay about an hour before zooming off to another destination to get the perfect instagram shot without taking any time to see what else is there. A great shame really as there is so much more to offer. When I wrote about our previous visit I concentrated more on other sites and the Aboriginal heritage of the area. This time I’ll look at what Hyden has to offer in terms of the natural world.
We decided to make a three day trip and on our way we’d stop off in Corrigin whose main claim to fame is the being the holder of the world record for the number of dogs in a ute and being the home to a dog cemetery. You’d be forgiven for thinking that Corrigin is a bit obsessed with dogs. Anyway it was a nice spot to break the journey, stretch the legs, make the bladder gladder etc. Corrigin does have a pretty impressive wildflower drive which begins just opposite the dog cemetery just on the outskirts of town. Most people just pull up in their car, jump out and walk a couple of metres. They then declare that there’s nothing to see and rush off in a cloud of red dust. Just take your time and have a poke about and you’d be amazed at what you can find. Here are a few examples.
When we got to Hyden we drove out to the Wave Rock Resort on the shore of Magic Lake which is where we were staying. The lake is quite startling. It’s not very big but is comprised of crystal clear salt water with a gypsum base. That pale coloured lake bed combined with the water makes a giant reflector that takes on the colours of the sky so as the day progresses the lake changes colour. To add to it’s other worldly qualities is that it lies in the middle of a salt plain which is fairly uniform in colour and is covered in mainly scrubby bush and a smattering of trees. It all made me want to get the tripod and graduated neutral density filters out.
The next day we decided to combine the Wave Rock Walk Circuit with the Hippo’s Yawn Loop and the Breakers Trail to create a loop that would take us from the resort up to the Hippo’s Yawn then along the bottom of the rock out to the Breakers picnic area and then back to our accommodation at the resort. The best part of it was that we could take the dog as it is all very pet friendly. Along the way we hoped to see more orchids and birds as we passed through the salt plain and into the bush at the base of the rock.
When we got to the base of the rock the vegetation changed from the scrub of the salt plain to thick bush fed by the water run off from the rock. We both enjoyed pocking around in the undergrowth looking for flowers, taking photos of each other and trying to dissuade Frida, our dog, from trying to climb up the rock face in search of interesting holes. It was amazing to see so many orchids – the blue beards were like a carpet in places. It was absolutely wonderful to see.
All in all we had a great time. There is so much to see and do that we’re already talking about going again. If you are planning a trip to Wave Rock there is a whole lot more to it than posing for a selfie for Facebook on the rock.
Teaser
Been playing with a new lens – and so far I’ve been very impressed and it’s made me reconsider my camera system. I’ll put up a full report in the next week or two. Here are a couple of photos to whet your appetite.
Both shots were taken with the Canon 6d, which continues to amaze me with its picture quality, and converted to monochrome in AlienSkin’s Exposure 4.
Frida Says
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