Early orchids for 2024

Another orchid season in the south west of Western Australia starts to get underway for 2024 and two of the early orchids are the banded greenhood (Pterostylis vittata) and the winter spider orchid (Caladenia drummondii).

The winter spiders are quite lovely with a lot of character and colour variation but they are also very small and hard to find. How small?

Oh yeah, these things are tiny, well they can be, they tend to rand from about 5cm up to maybe 15cm, the ones I found were mainly tiny and I had to be very careful not to tread on them as they are quite well disguised in amongst the leaf litter.

They grow mostly in mallee country and similar woodlands of the wheatbelt areas in amongst the leaf litter. My hunting was mainly around the areas east of Katanning and I was lucky enough to find hundreds of them over a couple of days,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

See the tiny spider hanging off this one?

It’s tiny.

Now onto the other orchids I’ve seen over the past couple of weeks, the banded greenhood and a few hare orchids. Usually I’m bored with seeing banded greenhoods, they flower over quite a long period and they are wide spread over the areas I go hunting, and well, quite boring to a degree.

So today, as there wasn’t really anything else around to photograph, I spent the day grovelling around in the dirt getting some different angled shots of these.

 

 

 

Oh and the hare orchids of course. Still a few of these around although it’s a little late in the season, though I haven’t seen to many of them this year, perhaps not a great season for them, at least not in my usual haunts.

 

Old and tired hare orchid, aptly how I felt after a long day out hunting, rolling around in the dirt.