You may be wondering what this is, it’s a flying duck orchid of the Paracaleana genus of orchids which rely on mimicking wasp species for fertilization. The big warty “head” of this duck orchid looks like the female of a wasp species, an unsuspecting male wasp flies down and tries to literally pick up what he believes to be a female, the warty head flicks around swinging him under to the business part of the flower, to pollinate it or collect pollen to spread to the next flower he tries to “pick up”.
Pictures
I’ve been tumbling rocks constantly for the last few months since I bought the tumbling kit. After years of collecting rocks while travelling around the country, it’s great to finally be able to see some of them at their best, polished and shining. These ones above were from Tassie along the north coast where there are a couple of fossicking areas, I believe most of them are jasper, though there’s some agate in there and petrified wood as well.
Taking photographs is one of the ways to keep myself amused while the lock down is still on, although it’s slowly letting up with W.A. opening some of it’s internal travel restrictions. Just outside of the cottage where I’m staying there’s a birdbath that’s proving to be a great joy with a wide variety of birds visiting it through the day.
I left Perth of a mission to drive the loop up towards Broome hugging the coastline before returning down the inland route following the wildflowers, a great trip of diversity. Beautiful ocean views, rugged coast lines and pristine beaches followed by wide open inland spaces with endless skies and carpets of colour. It was a good test for the van, over 5000km in just over a month through a wide variety of country.
This is going to be a post filled with plant pictures, it’s been a while since I posted up a selection of plant pictures and they keep building up as I regularly go out and take more pictures. I just spent a whole day out at kings park taking photos even though I have dozens that I need to put up already.
Time to post some more plant pictures, I’ve been taking a few since finishing my Bibbulmun walk and finally I’ve spent a couple of days sorting through them all. This picture above was strange, it looks like the flower is floating in blackness, but as with all the pictures I take it, was during the day and the photo hasn’t been edited.
The troopy was booked in to have a suspension upgrade at the end of January so I either had six weeks sitting around Ballarat over the Christmas new year period, or I could get my act together and do a road trip. I’d also been getting some serious hints from the local possums where I was staying at the caravan park.
This post is purely about more photos I’ve taken around Alice Springs. That’s the great thing about macro photography, you can find all sorts of possibilities within a small area, you don’t need huge spaces, just a good eye for finding interesting angles and things that look nice in the right light and the right angles.